Japanese Gardens/Chapter 13
CHAPTER XIII
SOME PARTICULAR GARDENS
“ ’Tis not my garden by real ownership,
Nor yet because my genius made its Art,
But, cherished by my love and tenderness,
That place is mine which lives within my heart.”
By the ownership of affection I am mistress of many gardens in Japan, and that kind of possession is ten points of the law. They are of varied sorts, these gardens of mine, and scattered over several provinces, and in the years I do not go to Japan in the flesh I visit them in the spirit, and enter my annual declaration of rights in them. They are not all magnificent show-places and great parks, such as, with the illimitable wealth of fancy, others might exclusively choose. Some are humble little plots of ground, the tiny back yards of flimsy wooden houses, whose torn paper windows (“the work of little fingers on the shoji”) open upon them. They are abloom only with gaily-clad children,—whose little noses invariably need wiping,—unless a wild flower or two adorns the miniature shrine, or a few Irises (which are not alone for the rich) grow beside the well. Poor and mean, perhaps, you would think these gardens, but I love them for the joy of growing things which they bring into the drab lives of their real owners, for their aspirations more than for their achievements. They are as pathetic, as wistfully beautiful, as is a crushed flower in the street to the lame child who has picked it up and tenderly cherishes it.
The finest of my fancy-owned domains are the grounds of temples, for there stately dignity and grandeur are to be found if ever in Japan, as surroundings and architecture must agree in style. Kaibara Yekken, in his advice to women, says: “Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples, being resorts for pleasure, should be sparingly visited before the age of forty.” This adage might have kept me out, but I took to heart rather what he says in another book on the Philosophy of Pleasure (Raku Kun), which Mr. W. G. Aston translates thus: “If we open our hearts to the beauty of Heaven, Earth, and the Ten Thousand Created Things, they will yield us pleasure without limit.”
One loves the quaint old churchyards of England, with their tangled grasses, their occasional flowers, their silence, and their peace, but the temple gardens of Japan are as far removed from such places as graves are. How carefully tended they are—it is their only fault! No leaves are allowed to lie, no sticks or stones to encumber any spot the landscape artist has not marked for them. All is as of Nature, but of an enriched and elegant sort, exquisitely spontaneous. Kyoto has numbers of such places—to Japanese eyes no longer as well groomed as their makers planned; the clipping is not so frequent; the bloom of Azalea may be seen where the rounded close green alone should show; but, to Western ideas, they are not less lovely for the sweet abandon of their dress.
Kodaiji, designed by the great landscape artist, Kobori Enshu, to suggest, in little, the Garden of Paradise, is such a place, and all the year there is something to admire and love there. Two great Pines are appropriately guarding the gateway, wishing long life to the garden and all that enter there.
In China, the temple grounds on the arid hills are the only cool and green oases where trees are to be found. In Japan, where beautiful trees are seen everywhere, they seem even bigger and fairer in these religious retreats, and the Fir trees, in particular, the Pines, the Cryptomerias, and the Hemlocks, are very imposing.
A Cherry tree, just inside this garden, droops in spring with its delicate rosy blooms, and displays its beauty of flower and twigs and trunk against the conifer’s deep green. Through another gate one may examine studiously the two charming lakes, the pretty islands (one the ‘Crane,’ one the ‘Tortoise’), the wooden bridge, which is ingenuously named ‘The Bridge of Heaven’; and, what I most delighted in, the ‘Moon-gazing Platform,’ which the great Hideyoshi had sat upon at Fushimi, whence it was brought to adorn this garden. Here are Irises, as Mr. Tyndale shows in the Buddhist temple gardens facing this and page 40; and Azaleas, whose blood-red bloom, just going off, was pale rose colour when I was there last, in June. There the Plum shows only one tree, but the Cherry takes its place. The October Maples are magnificent. The autumn, too, brings a wealth of Kiku flowers, for the old priest showed me many pots of Chrysanthemums, which he was tending and bringing on, with a spiny framework of bamboo training each spray, in just the same way as my gardener did at Hong-Kong.
The Choin-in Temple grounds, in Kyoto, are on a grander scale, and so the intimate loveliness of the smaller garden would not have been appropriate to it, although there are bits to cuddle to one’s heart, as the accompanying picture shows. Murray says that it spreads over sixty acres. I must take his word for it, as figures mean nothing to my non-mathematical brain. I only know that, when we had climbed to the top of that interminable flight of stone steps, we were so breathless that we would have believed anything concerning its size and the height of the great hill which was levelled for
AZALEAS IN THE CHOIN-IN TEMPLE GARDENS
KYOTO
the building of its temple. But, breathless or not, the place is awe-inspiring with the true sense of religion—though of an alien faith—in its great hall and its huge, heaven-reaching Pines.
The same thing one felt at Nikko, in the splendid temple grounds there, amid the finest Cryptomerias in the world, but we who were conscientious had little time to enjoy them, so hard at work were we kept examining the splendid details of the buildings they surround.
Gongen Temple, beside Lake Hakone, however, was a different matter. Every day, and sometimes twice a day, did we wander about its Cryptomeria-shaded paths, out to the end where the great trees grew smaller, and the golden light of the West empurpled the slim trunks silhouetted against it; and then on, through the Hydrangea-bordered track, to the ‘corner’ above the lake, where peerless Fuji, a dream mountain, an opalescent cone of colour and mist, seemed to float among the clouds.
Then also, in spite of an untoward adventure there, I must name the park-like grounds about the great Daibutsu at Kamakura. The monstrous bronze Buddha had not touched any of us, so ‘tourist-y’ it had seemed, until we had climbed up the dusty staircase and looked out of the little window at the back on to the green tops of the group of Cherry trees below. And then, suddenly, I had been transported back to my old home in the South when, a light, slim child, I had climbed up through the close, scratchy branches of an old Hawthorn tree, until I lay as in a prickly cradle on the flowering top itself. Then I loved the big Buddha who had revived that feeling of Nirvana-like rest after the thorns and struggles of my climb, and I love him still, though a snake entered my Eden, the serpent into Paradise. Now, I am really afraid of only one thing on earth, and that is a snake, my loathing for which approaches idiocy. When a child, if I but touched the picture of a snake, in turning a page, I would run and wash my hands. So when, after my descent from the Buddha, still dreaming, I flung myself down in the flickering shadows on a grassy bank, a big fat snake glided away beside my hands, I shot up in the air with a shriek that must have resounded from the metal god, with horror. One of our party was an ex-naval officer who served in South America, where a reptile is first killed and then examined afterwards to see if it is of a safe or dangerous sort. So, while I still yelled, he dispatched the worm of Buddha with his stick. As every one knows, Buddhists are forbidden to take life of any sort, and, as my noise had attracted every priest and acolyte in the country to the spot, it looked as if we should have some complicated explanations to make. But human nature was stronger than faith, in these people, and the natural aversion which the average man has from wiggly things made them palliate our crime. Indeed, they were so cordial and sympathetic that one might have thought they were secretly glad to be rid of the serpent, with the onus on another’s conscience! They gave me tea and picture-books and post cards, as they might have done for a frightened child, and measured the cause of all the tumult—out of sight of the windows. It was just under four Japanese feet in length, which would be just over four of ours; and to this day my naval friend declares, in self-extenuation, that it was of a highly poisonous variety.
How many other temple gardens might I name, enshrined in my remembrance! Ishiyama, on Lake Biwa, where the great authoress of that quaint and charming romance, Gengi Monogatari, who is known to history as Murasaki no Shikibu, tired of Court life, is said to have retired for seclusion and peace; another little place of worship, in the village of Uraga, below Yokosuka, in the Bay of Tokio, which, like Gongen, had red Shinto torii for the gateway, but Buddhist ceremonial and priests; the temple garden on the hill above Nagasaki; the water that forms the garden of the great temple at Myagima, with its darkly lapping tide delicately starred with the reflections of a hundred lanterns, and North and South, East and West, others which I know and love.
Of tea-gardens there are as many more in which I take a proprietary interest. They are inconsequent things, and catholic enough in style to meet the tastes of very varied patrons. Besides this, tea-gardens, more than any other sort, have affected and influenced the arrangements of other grounds. It will be remembered that Sen-no-Rikiu, Kabori Enshiu, and other great landscape artists were primarily masters of the tea ceremonies (Cha-no-yu). As they evolved and laid down laws for the one, they developed the other to correspond. The foundation of the art of tea-garden making is that of all the others—Nature! But where temple grounds can be serene, grand, imposing, or elegant, tea-gardens must be modelled on Nature’s homelier moods—where with wildness there is also found comfort, with rusticity quiet and tender charm. Flowers there should be, and running water, and the life and gaiety of darting carp or goldfish, or of domesticated birds, and these one always finds.
My first experience of Japanese tea-gardens was at Nagasaki, and I have never forgotten that panting climb, on a perfect May morning, with the big paper fish swinging in the sky at the tops of the masts, the flutter of petals and the scent of the Azaleas and of dried fish in the air. And how distinct is the memory of the faint amber-hued tea, so delicate and refreshing, brought to us in the tiny, dainty bowls the Japanese use as teacups, by the brightest-faced and most bubbling of nésans; and I can still taste the golden, rosy-touched loquats they peeled for us. And what a fuss they made over my fair-haired Young America, aged two and a half; how they felt his curls to see if they were real, got flowers and fruit and small cakes, and, finally, little toys, and a globe of goldfish for him to take away with him; and how the whole troupe of light-clad girls, giggling, full of glee, left all their other customers and escorted us down the whole length of those stone steps, and stood bowing and crying “Sayonara” and “Pliss come again,” until we were out of sight. I confess that, on my next visit without the blond boy, they did not remember me, but I hold them in my heart in spite of their sweet perfidy; for the garden, with its trees, its roses, and its view of one of the loveliest harbours in the world, remains the same.
On the road to Mogi, too, there are a number of tea-house gardens which are landmarks in one of the happiest days I ever spent. June was in perfection,—and what is so rare as a day in June, if it is sunny and bright, in Japan! The red covers on the big settees under the trellis were laid to help one enjoy the Azaleas in full bloom, and the little table to which our tea was brought had an arrangement of white Irises in a flat, pale green dish, and the smallest of goldfish, like little orange butterflies, swam about, as if flying, in the clear water at their feet. If I had not the heart to ask them to take away the hideous coarse white cloth with which the pretty silvery wood table was disfigured, it was because our hosts took such simple pleasure and pride in it, as the outward and visible sign of how au fait they were with foreign notions. But I would have Honourable Tea, instead of the dishonourable stuff from Ceylon—logwood-dyed, with tinned milk from Switzerland to put into it—which they evidently thought the foreigner ought to prefer.
A hundred other tea-house gardens one might name, each of some individual charm. Kyoto is perhaps richest in them. The illustration facing this page is fairly typical. The Hakone Pass has many attractive places; in Tokio—even in Yokohama and Kobe—there are so many pretty ones; and every mountain or hill that boasts a view has its little shelter, and tiny half-wild garden, where one can get tea, and cool and a fine prospect all at the same time. The only rule of the landscape artist’s lore that these spots observe is that they must exhibit no artificiality, but resemble Nature as closely as possible. Some have just been made, but are already part of the road. On the way up the mountain at Miyagima (by the fine path whose nineteen hundred odd granite steps were the gift of Prince Ito a month or two before his sudden tragic end), we found such a place. Himself, who, as a sailor, prefers climbing rigging to a mountain,
HYDRANGEAS IN TEA GARDEN
AT NICHI OTANI, KYOTO
and a good rest to either, declared when we were half-way up his intention of stopping at the next tea-house we came to. Made of warm, orange-toned new wood, we saw the gleam of it through the trees, but long before we reached it the old woman who owned the place, hearing a child’s voice with ours, had run down to meet and greet us on our way. It was hard, with her excited Japanese and our very limited command of the language, to understand her, and my five-year-old boy was rather frightened when she wanted to carry him on her back up the rest of the way. But after a time we made out that she had a little shrine dedicated to Gisu, the god who is kind to children, and she wanted our boy to place some stones at his feet. She had lost her own son, and was a widow and childless, and this was all she could do to help his little soul in the land to which he had gone. The good Gisu—it is strange, the resemblance in sound and in character to our Name, (for there is no other)—would guard her child, if other living children showed him their love and devotion. Such a pathetic little garden it was, made under the shelter of a great overhanging rock, with rough stone lanterns beside the tiny shrine, and wild flowers and ferns, carefully tended, put where they might catch a hold in the sparse soil. Our little chap brought a cartload of small stones to build up before the altar, and put all the loose change we had in the little wooden money-box as offerings, when we told him what the old woman hoped his act might do for her son. It was all we could do to keep her from carrying the child on her back up the remaining three miles to the top, so grateful was she. Indeed, I doubt if we could have dissuaded her if the laws of hospitality had not prevailed. Himself declaring his intention of awaiting our return at her little rest-house, and being in instant need of tea.
I wish I had the space—speaking of rest-houses—to describe the little garden on the bleak mountain-side of Fuji which I saw there when I made a memorable ascent years ago. The people who open these places are only allowed there for a few weeks in the summer, but, in spite of that, in the very cinders halfway up the old couple who gave out tea to pilgrims had managed to place some evergreen shrubs, had cultivated the white Fuji flower (not Wistaria) that grows in the ashes, and had some Reeds and grasses in a jar. In that desolation, as of death, there was life and greenness, and the joy in beauty.
Of private gardens it seems invidious to speak in particular, where, from rich and poor, I have been given of their best. One of the most splendid I have seen was at Uraga, a great park-like place, a hill garden, well watered, with cascade and brook and a little lake, trained trees and dwarfed ones, stretches of grassy ‘duck-land,’ quaint bridges, pagodas and lanterns of mossy stone. Another hill garden in the same locality was a honey-land for bees, so rich and sweet was it with fragrant, many-hued Azaleas. Still another was in the outskirts of Tokio, the classical garden of a famous Japanese nobleman and statesman, who ended by building an ugly, modern, ‘foreign’ house in the grounds, and letting the place to an Englishman.
One humble garden that I loved was behind an old thatched house on the shores of Lake Hakone. When in summer all the shoji were set open, one saw, in the dark frame of the walls, the crimson masses of velvety Phlox against the silver-blue of the lake and the bluer hills beyond; and no doubt for the happy owners there was a sight of incomparable Fuji around the shoulder of the hill, which the house-walls hid from us others, outside the pale.
Of wild gardens, where all Japan’s a garden, and all the men and women merely flowers, it is even a more hopeless task to begin to chronicle. But, thinking back over the years, the place of the kind which stands out most clearly in my memory is the hara between Chuzenji and Yumoto. The Great Gardener had planted as He willed, and the wide plain was one vast field of flowers. It was in late July, and yet so far up in the mountains were we, that pale Irises, quaker-robed, still lingered, and held silent meetings in damp hollows, while Azaleas, bold in their colour and rich in their perfume, ran like fire over field, beside rocks, through the underbrush, and into edges of the woods—the most heart-arresting sight I ever saw. A paraphrase of the Japanese poet might put it—
“Above Chuzenji, like a field on fire,
The wild Azalea’s scarlet paints the plains.
Or is it that the great gods fought and fell,
And blood-red flowers sprang up from the stains?”
I take the same delight that a savage does in fiery, passionate colour, and would have dismounted, and simply wallowed in Azalea blooms, if Himself, who has an occult gift for scenting the neighbourhood of snakes, had not warned me to stick to my horse. As it was, it seemed as if every turn of the rocky, uncertain path we had taken up to the hara revealed a sinuous zigzag darkly gliding into the cliff-side, or over the edge opposite, which leapt down almost sheer into the raging cataract below. I hate a height, and as my poor old doddering horse backed towards the precipice every time that he was bitten by a fly, or that I screamed at the sight of a snake, I was rather too literally between the devil—the serpent—and the deep sea—the abyss.
Another hara, or ‘upland meadow land,’ in which the flat plain is a great wild flower-bed, is at that lovely but missionary-ridden spot, Karuizawa. It has about the coolest climate in Japan, and reminded me, with its Maples, Ash trees, young Birches, and luzuriant grassy fields, of New England and Canada, while English friends kept exclaiming at its resemblance to the Highlands of Scotland. But my simile was the more accurate, as the botanists. Rein, Asa Gray, Sir Joseph Hooker, etc., have all been struck with the similarity of the vegetation of Japan in general to that of the Atlantic slope of North America, and of the flora of these hara regions in particular to that of the United States. I was indeed delighted, when I had painted dozens of flowers brought me by an enthusiastic friend, and had exclaimed on their likeness to those of my old home, and had remarked how odd it was that others, which I had never seen elsewhere, except in the ‘Sink Holes’ near St. Louis, had been verified by eminent authorities as being the very same things. Such a wealth of rich-hued Compositæ (fifty varieties, at least), of golden and purple Vetches, of Convolvuli, wild Larkspurs, Primulas, Spireas, ground Orchids, and deep-stained Brambles, as flourished there! It was a dazzling herbaceous border a mile wide at least; a gigantic ‘mixed bed’ whose seed had been sown broadcast. But the best of all was the real grass. No person who has not been exiled to the tropics for many years, where the grass is of wire, or of sharp swords, can know the pathetic joy we feel who come into our own again of velvet lawns and smooth pastures and tasselled meadows. Not even the fear of snakes can keep me from rolling in and on it there, like a young horse let loose in the fields! Eleven hundred missionaries, and the flat and nasal intonation of the Middle West, which is my country’s least pleasant characteristic, could not lessen my rapture in it. A fat old lady with a waist as wide as her shoulders (most of these godly people consider it a crime to compress the figure unduly, and the idea seems to be that the bigger the waist the more souls they can gather in), said to me, “Seems jest like Home, don’t it!” I agreed so heartily that I was soon hearing all her family history; and her son, and his wife and family of five children joined us (their ‘field’ was inland somewhere, in North China), and before we were done talking he was quoting Robert Louis and Walt Whitman, and we were old friends.
One other wild Nature garden which I must just mention was at Uraga—a shelf of blue Hydrangeas below a half-ruined, tree-embowered temple, on a cliff above the sea. The blue water, the pale strip of beach, the flowers drooping down to them—no artist but the Greatest had arranged it. I have not time or space to tell of a bamboo-shaded little dell above Hakone Lake, where the deep royal-blue of Monkshood, with some late lingering white Lilies, made such a picture; nor of the fiery borders of Nerine (Lycoris radiata) which September shows at the edges of the golden fields of rice paddy; nor of a hundred other places where God has been the Gardener, and the heart leaps at the results. Like Wordsworth’s daffodils, “they are the joy of solitude,” and mine own in love.