The Japanese, who have an exquisite system of their own of natural gardening, though of gardening in which all is designed and nothing left to chance, are very sparing of flowers. They would rather have one blossom where it will tell as a delightful surprise than a thousand where they merely make a mass of colour. Placing is everything to them, but their principles of placing and grouping are got from the close study of nature, like an artist’s principles of composition. We must not imitate them, for if we do, we shall merely parody them. Bamboos and stones and lanterns will not make a Japanese garden. But we can grasp the principles on which they express their love of nature in a garden; we can see clearly what is the difference between formal and natural gardening, and avoid the mistake of trying to combine the beauties of both. One is always uncomfortable in a garden when there are a thousand flowers where a hundred would be better. One may not be aware of the waste, but it wearies one all the same. The fascination of the East never dies. But there comes a fatal time when, to the voice of the Siren, sing she never so tenderly, there is no response. Age and new duties have forged fetters, sweet and soft as rose-leaves, but so binding that not even the loadstone mountain of Sindbad the Sailor would avail to tear them away from us, and so we are fain to satisfy our travel-hunger as best we may, feeding upon memory. Then it is that the relics gathered together during the adventures of many years acquire a new and almost sacred value. They speed the flight of our thoughts like the wings of Pegasus. The man who has chaffered with the Jew merchants in the picturesque gloom of the bazaars of Stamboul; who has bathed in Jordan and Scamander, and slept in the black tents of the Bedouin; who has wandered through the mysterious portals of the Chĭen Mĕn, the frowning gate of the Tartar city, to sip tea with some art expert in the Liu Li Chăng, the Paternoster Row of Peking, listening to stories of the dilettanti in the reign of Chĭen Lung the magnificent—such a man, if now he can do no more than trim the silken sails of his imagination, bound for the lands of enchantment, must have about him many a treasure which, if he but shut his eyes and give himself up to the luxury of dreaming day-dreams, will bring back to the old wanderer a whiff from the birthplace of the Sun, a whiff sweeter in his nostrils than those cloying perfumes to which the æsthetes, according to their affected euphuist jargon, “listened” centuries ago in the lovely gardens of Ginkakuji, the Silver Pavilion of the sacred city of Kiōto.[1]