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
