A Japanese garden has a certain poetry and secret charm of its own. To those who are adepts in its mysteries it is full of suggestion, but it is highly artificial; everything that you see in it is a contradiction of Nature, who, poor dear! is forced into obeying every craze and vagary of the artist, not being allowed to see a twig or a bud take the direction which she destined for it. In that it lacks the sweet simplicity and countrified untutored grace of our English Edens. It is not a place in which a young maiden would gather a posy bejewelled with May dew, or stoop to consult the ray-florets of a daisy as to the beating of her lover’s heart. There are many crafts in which we English folk have much to learn from abroad; in gardening that is not so—there we are not unskilled, indeed rather copied than copiers. We have our own gardens and we may rest content with them, since they give us without stint the full joys of form and colour, beauty and fragrance. What more do we want? The gardens of the Japanese may suit the fairies of their own legends, but the great god Pan would surely rather see his Dryads and Wood-nymphs tread a measure on the velvet of a trim English lawn, than picking their way among cruel stones to the torture of their rosy feet. But though we may not be minded to imitate in our own homes the eccentricities and fancies of Japanese garden experts—whims and fancies handicapped by the severities of austere tradition—there is no law to hinder us from taking a hint from some of the effects which they achieve, nor from introducing into our gardens some great masterpiece of one of those exquisitely imaginative artists whose smaller and daintier works are gems welcomed with such warmth elsewhere. Some months after the above lines were written there appeared in the _Times_ of May 6th, 1916, one of those charming articles on gardening with which we are from time to time favoured, in which the writer expresses much the same view of the Japanese gardener’s art that I hold. Only in one point I differ from him. It is not “a close study of nature” which guides the Japanese landscape maker; on the contrary, he follows whims and symbols hard to be understood. Every distorted stone which he brings at great expense from a huge distance must be so placed as to be in harmony with some cryptic principle of æstheticism. Nature is not what he aims at.