Johann Justus Rein (1835-1918) was a German
scholar who spent over ten years in apparently unhindered research all
over Japan.
Japanese art-gardening is carried on with very few
implements -- and these few but poorly adapted to their purpose -- but
with great manual skill. It does not compare with European gardening
in perfection of taste and execution, nor in the ways and means which
are at the command of our gardeners. It must be regarded, however, as
a sample of Japanese taste, just like some specimens of their art
industry. Our gardeners have learned with great care the requirements
of all the plant-life in their domain, and seek by fulfilling these
conditions to bring all to their highest natural perfection. On the
other hand, the Japanese gardener tries to keep all bushes and trees
constantly pruned and trimmed, and in many other ways to obstruct
their natural development; now to produce symmetrical forms, after the
fashion of old French gardening, and again to prevent symmetry by
fanciful creations, dwarfed and deformed figures, and to work in a way
utterly incomprehensible to us. There is now-a-days a tendency in
Europe to imitate this sort of gardening in its quaint artificiality;
but it is not according to our taste, and only admissible in
exceptional cases. Our gardeners help nature; the Japanese do her
violence [sic]. But Japanese gardening
is praised in many books, just for this unnatural tendency, while to
us it appears like incomprehensible trifling and waste of effort.
Dwarfing or enlarging one part at the expense of the other,
variegation and cultivation of every accident or trick of nature, are,
as has been intimated, the careful occupation of the Japanese
gardener. He distinguished himself in these efforts, and even
becomes, in one or the other, a specialist. He works with great
enjoyment to himself, and knows also that he is pleasing the taste of
his customers, among whom he counts not only the educated and the
rich, but also the ordinary labourer.
The Japanese not only take great pleasure in this artificial
deformation, but they admire and collect also natural malformations of
every kind. They admire a stone, e.g., through which water has
worn a hole, or an old decaying tree-trunk with one or more plants
growing out of a knothole where seeds have been accidentally lodged.
This is due to the same intellectual laziness
[sic], and is an example of the charm which striking phenomena
have for many people with us also, and which the uneducated admire
everywhere, but with us the admiration is usually diverted from nature
to other objects.
Dwarfing or Nanisation is the name which we give to the various
operations for producing dwarfed forms, an art in which the Chinese
and Japanese are masters, and which they employ more with ornamental
plants than with fruit trees. Chinese girls cripple and deform their
feet in tiny shoes, and the art and trade gardeners of Eastern Asia
frequently check the growth of plants by forcing them into small jars,
by frequent transplanting, and by scanty nourishment and close
pruning. Their exertions seem directly either to reduction of size,
while retaining the form, or to the production of monstrosities of
different kinds.
To produce a slow growth they choose particularly small seeds
from a poorly developed individual plant. Frequent cutting back has
been found even more effective, also planting in pots of insufficient
size. Twisting the twigs and stems in a horizontal spiral direction
has the same effect, and the refrigeration of the ground and roots by
evaporation, using porous pots. Grafting is often also a means to
this end, i.e. it serves to check natural development. It is
employed especially in the many varieties of Momiji (Acer
polymorphum), and is usually effected according to the oldest
methods known to gardening -- grafting by juxtaposition, a sort of "greffe
par approche" as it is called by the French. The cutting which is to
be engrafted is sharpened on one side and laid in an incision cut
diagonally in the wild tree, or attached to the wild stock by a sort
of splicing, and then carefully bound.
Some of the results obtained in Chinese and Japanese gardening
in dwarfing species are very surprising. Kaempfer relates that he
once saw growing together in a small box, 4 inches long, 1-1/2 inches
broad, and 6 inches high, a bamboo cane, a pine tree, and a blooming
Mume-plum tree. The price of this group of dwarfs was 1,200 Dutch
gulden or nearly £100: an evidence of the difficulty and tediousness
of the accomplishment, also a token of the high estimation of such
abnormal form; for what nurseryman in Europe would think of asking
one-tenth of this sum for this sort of production?
The employment of this peculiar art of Nanisation on some of
the coniferae is very popular, especially on the Matsu (Pinus
Massoniana and P. densiflora), the Nagi (Podocarpus
Nageia) and Koyamaki (Sciadopitys verticillata), also on
Mume (Prunus Mume), Sakura (P. pseudocerasus), Kaki (Diospyros
kaki), Momo (Amygdalus persica), Masaki (Euonymus
japonicus), and several other ornamental plants, among them the
bamboo cane. Particularly scarce varieties of such dwarf plants are
put up in finely decorated blue porcelain pots, and bring high prices.
[A particular nonedible tree-fungus]
bears the name of Reishi, and is a dry, hard, and really worthless
sort of hood-mushroom, in appearance related to the Polyporus lucidus,
Fries. or P. amboinensis of Farther India and the Malay Archipelago.
Reishi is the size of our champignon (A. campestris), and has a stalk
which grows occasionally 15 cm. long, and is dark brown like the
hood. If it perchance grows to be a curiosity on the stem of an old
dwarf-tree in a gardener's pot or tub, the tree is straightaway taxed
[sic] from one to two yen (4 to 8
shillings) higher, and looked upon as a sign of luck, Medetai, and an
occasion for congratulation. Reishi counts, too, as a good omen in
general, and is used to decorate the Tokonoma or slightly raised
projection of a room.
It is worthy of note the dwarf training, so popular in Japan
with decorative plants, is seldom applied to fruit trees. The same is
true of pyramidal, cordon, and wall-fruit training which are so much
esteemed and so widely known in Europe. 1
