ABSTRACT
The Japanese garden, like the house, presents features that never enter into similar places in America. The Japanese have brought their garden arts to such perfection that a plot of ground ten feet square is capable of being exquisitely beautified by their methods. Plots of ground that in this country are too often encumbered with coal-ashes, tea-grounds, tin cans, and the garbage-barrel, in Japan are rendered charming to the eye by the simplest means. In gardens of larger size these little mountains are sometimes twenty, thirty, and even forty feet in height, and are built up from the level ground with great labor and expense. Irregularly and grotesquely shaped stones and huge slabs of rock form an important feature of all gardens; indeed, it is as difficult to imagine a Japanese garden without a number of picturesque and oddly-shaped stones as it is to imagine an American garden without flowers.
