Page:Things Japanese (1905).djvu/71

Rh Prof. Matsumura, of the Tōkyō University and Botanical Gardens, at fifty, not including of course numerous varieties and sports. Thirty-nine are indigenous; the others have been introduced at various times from Korea, China, or the Luchu Islands, either for industrial use or as exotics for the adornment of rich men's gardens. Such are the hōchiku, or square bamboo, and the suwō-chiku whose stem, when young, is of a bright red hue. To our own thinking, some of the commonest species are also the most graceful, the mōsō-dake or "feathery bamboo," for instance, with its golden stem and overhanging plume-like fronds, clumps of which—though it, too, was introduced from China no earlier than A. D. 1738—are now among the most typical features of the Japanese landscape, and the sasa, or bamboo grass, that grows on hills and in country lanes, and whose leaves, bright green in spring, become edged with white as the year wanes, so that each comes to look like a little "cloud with a silver lining."

Most Europeans persist in regarding the bamboo as a delicate tropical plant, which would not stand our northern climate. We should like to show such persons the tall Japanese bamboos bending under the weight of the February snow, in parts of the country where the snowfall is measured, not in inches, but in feet. As a matter of fact, the bamboo in snow-time is a favourite Japanese art-motive.

By the Japanese themselves the bamboo is not regarded as a tree. In their eyes it forms a category apart, so that they speak of "trees and bamboos." Properly it belongs to the grasses:—it is just a giant grass, and nothing more. Its rate of growth is astonishing compared with that of most other members of the vegetable kingdom, sometimes several feet in the course of four-and-twenty hours. Indeed, from every point of view the bamboo presents interesting subject-matter for observation, while practically it is one of nature's choicest gifts to man.