CHAPTER III
GARDENING PRINCIPLES
“Oh! Adamant Art! The Garden Artist says:
Thus may you plant, and thus and thus may move.
You love your garden, set in such strict ways?
My sweetheart’s small, but limits not my love.”
An art whose only limits are those set by Nature herself is not a restricted one; and, although a little study of the involved considerations of the Japanese landscape artist makes one suppose that it is too much hedged about by classic formalism to have any spontaneity or freshness left in it, a deeper scrutiny convinces one that the boundaries of this science are only those of Nature’s own making. She is the fountain-head, the great teacher; hers is the infallible pronouncement.
Put simply, landscape gardening in Japan is a reproduction, more or less reduced in scale, of the scenery of the surrounding country. This is its material foundation; but, just as every scene from Nature, of whatever composition of rock and river and hedgerow, has its effect on the feelings and the imagination, so the Japanese
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