CHAPTER IX
LANDSCAPE GARDENS
“One says your little garden stands
Encompassed by trees.
I speak not loud but my heart replies:
My garden’s bounded by the skies,
All’s mine that my mind’s heart sees.”
Practically speaking, all gardens in Japan are landscape gardens, and one can almost turn the phrase inside out and declare that all landscapes in Japan are gardens. The gardens are reproductions, on a small scale, of the scenery of Japan, and the scenery of Japan is a large edition of its gardens. It is not a case, however, of the chicken and the egg, for the gardens do not claim to have appeared first, and to have set the fashion for the landscape. The art, as has been said before, originally came from China, but it was so breathed upon by the national genius, so enriched by the inborn poetic nature of its Japanese interpreters, that it became, in the truest sense, a Japanese institution.
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