|Reginald John Farrer (1880-1920) was an English naturalist and plant explorer who grew up in Yorkshire. There, he made a famous rock garden which included specimens collected from the European Alps. He lived in Japan for eight months in 1903, renting a traditional house with garden. He also made a brief excursion over to China and Korea while there. A decade later he went to the Chinese provinces of Yunnan and Gansu for two years. His 1919 two-volume The English Rock Garden is still the classic work on that subject, popularizing the then underdeveloped art. He wrote in a characteristic flourish prose. After the World War, Farrer collected in Burma near the Chinese border. It was during his second year that he became ill and died there. 1|
Garden of Asia (1904)
...A Japanese nursery garden is a revelation.
There, on benches, in rows, sit tortured [sic]
trees in their bowls or pans of faience (earthenware decorated with opaque
colored glazes). Their perfection is a marvel of patience, requiring years
for its accomplishment. Sometimes one man will give as much as thirty
years' attention to a single little cherry tree. Each curve, each
leaf, each twig has its direction and proportion regulated by the most
rigid and immemorial principles, and to have any value in Japanese eyes,
a dwarf must conform absolutely to the iron rules laid down by the canons
of taste in the days when Iyeyasu Tokugawa paralysed into an adamantine
immobility the whole artistic and intellectual life of the country.
The effect is of course exquisite in its elaborate and rather morbid [!]
But it must be said that there are many dwarfs -- very many, who go for
low prices, owing to the imperfections of their development. They
have a bough or a bend that is not prescribed. Consequently the Japanese
will but them -- indeed, with pleasure -- but will not admit their claims
to be works of art. Naturally he will buy them, as even so they are
beautiful, and their price brings them within range of everyone's ambition...
However, these Japanese trees that fill the gardens are wonderful with
all their imperfections, and the untutored savage eye of the West entirely
fails to see any difference between a perfect specimen ten inches high,
three centuries in age, and thirty pounds in price, and its neighbour of
equal height, of five years' growth, and five shillings' value. They
are all dainty. They are of every kind. There are cherries,
plums crowded with blossom; chimonanthus, kerria, magnolia, azalea, with
gnarled and twisted trunks; and, in their season, the right number of leaves
in the ordained place, and a few flowers of the proper shape, borne precisely
where they ought to be borne. These little trees, so different from
the inferior specimens sent over here [Europe]
to charm inferior European taste, convey a feeling of perfect contentment.
They are completely satisfying. One can see no fault in them anywhere.
They give the eye rest from fault-finding. Consequently, in looking
at them one has a strange sense of repose. Their impeccable curves
give the same quality of the same soothing appreciation that one receives
from the impeccable curves of a paragraph in Jane Austen [sic].
There is nothing either to add or to remove. So criticism can go
to sleep, and the soul have complete leisure for enjoyment, whereas, in
all other pleasures of this diverse world, however keen they be, the faculty
of criticism always remains alert and fatiguing. These trees are
a lesson in satisfaction.
Now all Japanese gardens, as Aristotle says of all arts, are a mimesis. They aim at a reproduction of some corner of nature, some aspect of nature. The Japanese is not a lover of flowers and of gardening in themselves, so much as for the effect of a combination. He is of no use as a practical gardener for growing normal plants in their normal health. He brutalises them, ignores their wishes, and harries them to death. On the other hand, he is unsurpassable when it comes to distorting, torturing, and tweaking into fantastic byways the plain courses of nature. It is not the plant he loves. It is the effect that the plant enables him to attain. He touches the highest point of artificiality. But he must never be called a good gardener. The true gardener cares far less for the freakish or abnormal possibilities of a plant than for the plant itself, as an individual, requiring the closest attention, and brilliantly rewarding a loyal devotion. A true gardener is the humble slave of nature [sic]; a Japanese her contemptuous tyrant. Accordingly, the Japanese garden is a paradise of stones rather than of blossom.
Here are tiny paradises [for sale during Matsuri (festival) at a florist's stall]: little aged, trees, plums, cherry, or peach, according to the season, towzled bunches of white or rosy flower; or twisted pines ready for planting, or blooming azaleas of three inches height. 2
1 Jellicoe, Sir
Geoffrey and Susan Jellicoe (consult. eds.) and Patrick Goode and Michael
Lancaster (exec. eds.) The Oxford Companion to Gardens (Oxford
University Press, 1986), pp. 184-185.
2 Farrer, Reginald J. The Garden of Asia, Impressions from Japan (London: Methuen & Co., 1904), A Japanese nursery garden quote from pp. 17-21; cf. same in "The Gardens of Tokyo" by Reginald Farrer, pp. 379-80 in Macmillan's magazine Vol. LXXXIX, March 1904; Now all Japanese gardens quote from pp. 22-23.; cf. with J.J. Rein; Here are tiny paradises quote from pg. 208.