| "Making Japanese Miniature
Gardens"
The miniature garden
industry in Japan has been transplanted to the United States. For
several centuries the leading landscape gardeners of Japan have
made miniature models of their work so their customers might see
how the proposed gardens would look; very much in the same way an
American architect will make a prospective drawing of a house,
except in this case the garden is made perfect in every detail,
except that it is in miniature.
The care and degree of exactness put into these gardens is
remarkable. Great care is used to select exactly the right kind
of stones, sand and pebbles to use in each part of the design.
Trees are even dwarfed and stunted through many years of careful
watching in order that they may add to the completeness of the
picture.
These miniature gardens are called in Japanese, “Hako Niwa,”
meaning dish gardens, because they are usually built in large
earthenware bowls. Every Japanese garden contains a stream or
lake with one or more bridges spanning from shore to shore. If a
natural body of water does not exist, the landscape gardener
simply goes ahead and makes it.
For a number of years
an annual contest or exhibit of these toy gardens has been held in
the city of Kioto, at which the leading landscape gardeners of
Japan exhibit their work. A great demand has grown up among the
tourists who visit the land of the cherry blossom for copies of
these miniature gardens to take back with them to America.
In response to this growing trade demand, one of the large
Japanese nurseries has opened a branch near New York City, where
one of their expert garden designers devotes his entire time in
constructing miniature gardens for the American public. These
gardens may be properly divided into two classes. The first,
which represents a Japanese garden or familiar landscape in which
the landscape and the house are the principal feature, and the
dwarf trees are only secondary; and the other type in which a very
old dwarf tree is made the central feature, with a few stones and
moss-covered rocks at its base to give an impression of its native
heath. 1
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