JAPANESE GARDENS
CHAPTER I
ON JAPANESE GARDENS IN GENERAL
“Here in my leafy garden where I sit,
Protected by the big trees, kind and green,
I learn to love contentment more than wit,
The lure of known things less than those unseen.”
While the gardens of the Japanese have much of material charm, of rich and plentiful vegetation, of rare and splendid as well as exquisite though less striking flowers, of gracious bodily attraction (if I may so name it), it is to the inner sense, to the mind and the heart, that they make their chiefest appeal. In its most real meaning a garden, to them, must be a place of repose, of contemplation, of spiritual communion with Nature. There can a man loaf, and invite his soul; and, though that soul may be shrivelled and shrunk to the dimensions of a withered Jerusalem Rose, it will swell and grow and blossom in the atmosphere of the place. The very shopkeeper who may have done you an ill turn in business (just as a
