(which is not without its charms, and here are Mr. Conder’s ‘quaint and fanciful conceits’ if you will) the most spontaneous-seeming, perfectly balanced, and most fascinating art of landscape gardening in the world!
Mr. Conder tells us that the sixth century saw the introduction of Chinese ideas into Japan—in monasteries, of course; for priests, in every country, were the cultivators and earliest workers in all the arts. The Chinese originator is supposed to be Yohan Koan Han, who made great artificial hills, a hundred or more feet high (‘Coal’ Hill, near the Tartar City in Peking, is one of this sort), and brought water by pipes to form artificial lakes and ponds. Later, in the time of the ‘Son’ Dynasty, another artist, Chu-Men-Ton-Kwan, adorned other artificial rockeries of equal height with flowering trees and shrubs. But before this time the Japanese had a style of their own, called the Shindai Shiki, or the ‘Imperial Hall’ style, which shows that the impulse towards artistic gardening, together with a love of Nature, already existed. Although not much is known concerning it, except that the quadrangle, about three sides of which the palace was built, contained an irregular lake, with an island and a little bridge connecting it with the shore, and that a Plum and an Orange tree grew one on each side of the entrance to the hall, it is enough to show that formalism, even then,
