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Japanese gardens in Edwardian Britain: landscape
and transculturation
Setsu Tachibana, Stephen Daniels and Charles Watkins*
School of Geography, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK
Abstract
This article examines ideas of gardening, landscape and transculturation in Edwardian Britain through the
fashion for Japanese gardens. Emphasis is placed on the writing and practice of two influential figures: Josiah
Conder (1855– 1920) and Reginald Farrer (1880– 1920). Conder was one of the leading proponents of Japanese
gardens and his book Landscape Gardening in Japan (1893) was a crucial source of ideas about Japanese gardens
in the English speaking world. Farrer, who wrote extensively on rock gardens and developed his own plant nursery,
was strongly influenced by his travels in East Asia and Japan. We focus on the creation of three different gardens in
Britain: Newstead Abbey, Nottinghamshire; Cowden Castle, Clackmannanshire and Ingleborough Hall,
Yorkshire. We show how Ethel Webb, the owner of Newstead Abbey, was strongly influenced by Conder’s
book and used it to produce a pattern book Japanese garden. At Cowden Castle, the employment of Japanese
garden designers and gardeners helped in the creation and management of an ‘authentic’ Japanese garden. At
Ingleborough Hall, Farrer created his own ‘natural’ rock gardens using exotic alpine plants. His gardening and
estate management around Clapham village can be seen as an attempt to create a ‘hybrid’ landscape garden.
q2004 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
Introduction
A garden in Japan is a representation of the scenery of the country, though it is essentially a Japanese
representation. Favourite rural spots and famous views serve as models for its composition and
arrangement. The laws of natural growth and distribution are closely studied and punctiliously applied
in the management of even the smallest detail. The artificial hills, rocks, lakes, torrent beds, and
cascades of gardens are copied from striking features in the varied landscape of the country.
(Josiah Conderig 1964)
1
Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2004) 364–394
www.elsevier.com/locate/jhg
0305-7488/$ - see front matter q2004 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
doi:10.1016/S0305-7488(03)00049-5
*Corresponding author.
E-mail address: charles.watkins@nottingham.ac.uk (C. Watkins).
Not to plunge into the bottomless sea of their mysticism and symbolism in design, the sight of a Japanese
garden is enough to bring tears of ecstasy to the eyes of any garden-lover. No distortions, no abortion, no
discords are there, but some corner of landscape carefully copied to scale, with a sense of harmony and
perspective so perfect that in a cottage yard four yards square you will seem to have half a mountainside.
(Reginald Farrerig 1904)
2
Japanese gardens were highly fashionable in Edwardian Britain, and in the decade before the outbreak
of the First World War became something of a craze. Like the term ‘English garden’ which it helped
redefine ‘Japanese garden’ denoted a variable national style, a shifting blend of designs and materials, of
varying historical and geographical origin, packaged for consumption in a thriving horticultural market.
While central to a sense of native, even insular, national identity, gardens have proved one of the main
contact zones for cultural exchange between Britain and the world, both its imperial rivals like Holland
and France and its subject territories. The process of transculturation in gardens has operated at the level
of design, in both silent appropriation of styles and their conscious reproduction as ‘Italianate’, ‘Dutch’,
‘American’ and so on, and at the level of materials, notably plants, with physical adaptation and
hybridisation. As ever, this process was enabled by broader transfers of expertise, patronage, technology
and capital.
3
In this paper, we consider how the exotic style of Japanese gardens was incorporated and hybridised
in Britain. We use detailed archival and field evidence for three gardens, which display different stories
of cultural exchange and assimilation. The makers of the three gardens all visited Japan and transferred
different aspects of Japanese gardens to their estates. At Newstead Abbey and Cowden Castle, the
gardens were strongly influenced by Josiah Conder’s popular text Landscape Gardening in Japan of
1893. At Cowden, authenticity was further attempted through the employment of Japanese garden
designers and a Japanese gardener. Reginald Farrer at Ingleborough Hall used a horticultural and
philosophical understanding of Japanese rock gardens to modify his Yorkshire landscape and create
hybrid gardens. Through an understanding of the making of these three gardens, the paper shows how
British ideas of Japanese landscapes and nature were informed by a variety of transcultural flows of
ideas, images and plants.
The fashion for Japanese gardens spread throughout Europe and the United States, stimulated by a series
of related developments following the opening of Japan’s ports in the mid-19th century which ended
250 years self-imposed isolation: the introduction and domestication of trees, shrubs and flowers; the vogue
for design, arts and crafts known as ‘Japonisme’; the publication of travel books and tourist guides; the
flourishing export market in mature plants and bulbs and stone ornaments; and, perhaps most significantly,
the display of gardens in international exhibitions, which received visitors in their millions and extensive
coverage in the popular press, including the many illustrated garden magazines.
4
Western nations made
competing claims on Japanese culture, as they did to influence its modern development. In the United
States, where it was routinely claimed that Japan was effectively ‘opened’ by an American squadron led by
Commodore Perry, Japanese artefacts were seen as a challenge to European cultural supremacy, and an
incentive to American ambitions in the Pacific. In Britain, Japan was increasingly regarded as a global
partner, with a comparable imperial history in which gardens featured strongly (Fig. 1)
5
.
In the 1860s nurserymen John Gould Veitch and Robert Fortune travelled to Japan to gather plants
new to the West from nurseries in the horticultural centre of Yedo, temple gardens on the city periphery
and, from an expedition to the summit of the sacred mountain Fuji-yama. In reports, to the garden press
and Royal Geographical Society, they marvelled at a garden culture among all ranks that appeared to
S. Tachibana et al. / Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2004) 364–394 365
mirror that in their own country.
6
They made a fortune auctioning plants and stocking their nurseries,
advertising them in gardeners’ magazines and horticultural shows, fuelling the fashion for Japanese
flowers, trees and shrubs such as lilies, magnolias, conifers, maples, bamboos and flowering cherries.
7
Indeed one of the earliest Japanese gardens was created out of the Veitch nurseries in Coombe Wood,
Surrey, if, with its spreading shrubs, colourful underplanting and bright orange pavilions and bridges, it
bore little resemblance to the consciously authentic, designed gardens promoted from the end of the
century. While some Japanese plants were valued as specimens which demanded carefully controlled
conditions, others were valued for ‘hardiness’, flourishing in uncultivated environments including
smoky industrial cities, marshland and heathland, and showing throughout the year. Some plants, like
Aucuba japonica, were thoroughly assimilated, others like the Japanese larch, physically hybridised.
8
Such so called ‘wild gardening’, with hardy exotics combined with native flora, was popularised in a
revivified English landscape art.
9
A Japanese garden displayed at the 1873 International Exhibition in Vienna was re-assembled in the
grounds of London’s Alexandra Palace, with the idea that it would be staffed by Japanese from whom
visitors would be able to purchase Japanese goods and curiosities. The design itself recalled the English
invented, stereotyped far-eastern landscape, familiar on porcelain plates hanging in many suburban
Fig. 1. Commemorative plate from the Japan British Exhibition of 1910, showing two Island Empires. Source: Private
collection.
S. Tachibana et al. / Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2004) 364–394366
villas. ‘There is the little mound, the bridge, the stream with which are familiar on the Chinese
and Japanese plates and dishes’, noted The Garden, ‘we seem only to want the Weeping Willow to make
it complete’.
10
Connoisseurs of japonisme in gardens, as in other aspects of culture, sought to strip away
the taint of chinoiserie. With its fall from imperial power, China was increasingly regarded as a decayed
and degraded civilisation, its treatment of nature typically tortuous and perverse, in contrast to what was
seen as a vital, natural culture of Japan.
11
Respect for Japan increased with its rise as the major imperial
power in the East, after victorious wars with China (1895) and Russia (1905) and the establishment of
colonies on the Asian mainland and Pacific islands. Unequal treaties were renegotiated; an Anglo-
Japanese alliance of 1902 was renewed in 1905 and 1911.
12
Commentators adjusted their cultural
evaluations, seeking similarities in such realms as racial physiognomy and physical geography,
including climatic and topographical conditions regarded as favourable to the culture of gardening. By
the turn of the century, exhibitions of Japanese culture in Europe were sponsored by the Japanese
government as sites of cultural exchange.
13
From the 1880s, the Meiji government instituted a policy of employing western experts, known as
oyatoi, to help modernise administration and infrastructure, and many aspects of national culture,
including architecture, banking, planning, education, law and transportation.
14
‘English’ parks and
gardens were laid out around the occidental buildings of the treaty port of Yokohama and the rebuilt and
renamed capital Tokyo, sometimes on the sites of the daimyo gardens of the former feudal elite.
15
Europeans were employed to staff new art schools, introducing western conventions in the theory and
practice of landscape art. The writings of John Ruskin had a profound influence on Japanese landscape
tastes, notably for mountain scenery and its scientific appreciation. Japanese texts like Nihon Fukeiron
(A Discourse on Landscape) by Shiga Shigetaka were keen to seek equivalencies or precedents in
Japanese culture for western conventions.
16
Not surprisingly some of the resident oyatoi, as well as
visiting western tourists and artists, were attracted to what was called the Old Japan, in contrast to the
New Japan which made their views possible. Conflicts between kaika, enlightenment and injun
traditions were a frequent subject of commentary in Japan, for example, in popular prints, and in reaction
to official occidentalism where some affirmation and renewal of traditions, not least in garden design
took place (Fig. 2).
17
The government encouraged an export-oriented horticultural industry. In
Yokahama, large nurseries were established, such as L Boehmer’s (originally owned by an oyatoi
commissioned for his forestry expertise) and the Yokohama Nursery Company. British based nurseries
stocked an increasing range of Japanese plants and ornaments, as did the leading arts and crafts design
store Liberty’s which advertised Japanese stone lanterns alongside its Celtic style bird baths.
18
A series of English landscape painters and illustrators visited Japan, making reputations in both
Tokyo and London with exhibitions and publications. Alfred Parsons visited Japan in 1892, exhibiting
his watercolours of temple gardens, woodland groves and flower shows at the Tokyo Art School,
which he later published in English and American magazine articles and books. Parsons promoted a
deeper cultural understanding of gardens in Japan than was current in the West, but also helped recast
gardens for western consumption through his picturesque compositions and focus on flowers (in Japan
traditionally seen as of secondary importance to stonework). The pictures framed Parson’s own
increasingly involvement in garden culture in England, often in a consciously ‘English’ style, both as
illustrator and designer.
19
In turn, some Japanese artists took up residence in London, notably Markino
Yoshio, renowned in literary circles for his sage conversation and writings as well as paintings of the
mist shrouded city.
20
The planning and building of the first ‘Japanese gardens’ in Britain was
publicised in the horticultural press. In the Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society, James Hudson,
S. Tachibana et al. / Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2004) 364–394 367
overseeing the Japanese Garden at Gunnersbury, Middlesex, for Leopold de Rothschild, revealed that
the idea originated with some photographs Rothschild had taken of a Japanese garden by Lake Como,
and paintings of gardens in Japan by Ella Du Cane exhibited in London. Hudson followed these rather
than the ‘lines… laid down by some authorities on Japanese gardens’. Much of the article was devoted
to plants, and the photographs of the garden show, in five years, a profusion of foliage (Fig. 3).
21
Held under the auspices of the Japanese government, the Japan– British exhibition at the White City,
London in 1910 sought in the official declaration, to ‘cement and make greater andmore lasting friendship
between two great ‘Island Empires’’.
22
There were displays of the New Japan, palaces of finance, industry,
railways and education and a Palace of the Orient (including exhibits on Japanese colonies in Formosa,
Manchuria, Kwantung and Korea), tableaux of imperial history, including celebrations of recent military
victories over China and Russia and reconstructions of two ‘native villages’ of subject minorities, in
Formosa and Hokkaido. Sited at the entrance were the two main gardens, the Garden of Peace and Garden
of Floating Islands. Designed by Tokyo landscape architects Hannosuke Izawa and Keijiro Ozawa, one of
the key figures in rescuing and restoring traditional gardens in Japan,
23
and built by Japanese workmen, the
progress of their building was reported frequently in the garden press and upon completion they became
the main icons of the exhibition. The Garden of Peace, named ‘in harmony with the spirit in which Japan
has participated in the… Exhibition’ had shrine-topped hills and a lake, with a house, wisteria arbour and
iris pond. The Garden of Floating Islands was more dramatic, with rocks and precipices and cascades, and
a series of bridges joining the islands, and some tea-houses along the edge. Views of Shepherd’s Bush were
screened by canvas painted with scenic pictures of pine forests. Plants, trees and goldfish were shipped
from Japan; rocks and boulders transported from Devon and Derbyshire.
24
For visitors inspired to create
their own Japanese gardens, or just give established gardens Japanese highlights, the Yokohama Nursery
Company exhibited over 2000 plants, including miniature trees, and scores of ornaments, and distributed
their brilliantly illustrated mail order catalogues. Some of the resident elite Japanese community, and
some Japanese officials, established a distance from the blend of commercial, cultural and political values
on display. The Japanese Department of Education was careful to say:
Fig. 2. Japanese popular print, Kaika injun kohai kagami, c 1873. Source: Kobe-shiritsu-Hakubutsukan (Eds) (Kobe City
Museum eds) Meiji Tetsudo Nishiki-e (Colored Woodblock Prints on Railway in the Meiji Era) (Kobe 1994).
S. Tachibana et al. / Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2004) 364–394368
‘The gardens are not purely Japanese. They manifest the good feeling existing between the
horticulturalists of England and Japan; equally they symbolise the alliance between our two
countries, for Japan supplied the ideas and the plants while Britain contributed the site and
materials’.
25
Fig. 3. Postcard of the Japanese garden at the 1910 White City Exhibition. Source: Private collection.
S. Tachibana et al. / Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2004) 364–394 369
With the powerful impression that these exhibition gardens made on the British public, and the
increasing popularity of Japanese plants and ornaments, discussions of Japanese gardens focussed on
issues of authenticity, and on degrees and kinds of Japanese influence (Fig. 4). The most spectacular,
complete examples, some commissioned by businessmen, were extremely expensive to create and
maintain, and attracted the insinuations of nouveau riche vulgarity which had been made a century
Fig. 4. Japanese Gardens in England (1860– 1939).
S. Tachibana et al. / Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2004) 364–394370
earlier towards those deploying Chinese and Indian styled gardens. On the other hand, vulgarity could be
the result of the very availability of a few Japanese ingredients within the price range of a small suburban
gardener. The editor of Country Life announced in 1915 that ‘the disposition of a few typical ornaments,
of a bronze stork here and a stone lantern there, does not make a Japanese garden; it only makes an
English garden speak with a Japanese voice’.
26
Purist advocates of the style objected to features arranged
without the deeper meanings—of artistry, scholarship, etiquette and philosophical wisdom—attributed
to traditional Japanese culture, or the more arcane aura which attracted devotees of mysticism. The
leading authority on English garden design, Gertrude Jekyll, kept the style of gardens in Japan at a
respectful distance, maintaining that it would be folly to attempt to reproduce it.
27
Some propagandists
were keen to cite a Japanese precedent for many established features of gardens in Britain, from an iris
parterre to the use of native plants. A series of articles by Hayward in The Gardeners’ Magazine from
1909 to 1911 argued that the established importance of water, rock and wild gardening made garden
culture in Britain peculiarly receptive to Japanese influence. The ‘old English garden’ would be
reclaimed from two centuries of continental European influence, turned progressively ‘into a living
picture’. Japanese influence would ‘widen the scope of the landscape gardener’, bringing a ‘vitality and
transforming power’: ‘It is virile, throbbing with life and beauty. The possibilities stretch out beyond the
horizon full and free’.
28
The writings of Josiah Conder and Reginald Farrer, which are quoted at the head of this article, both
focussed and reformed the fashion for Japanese gardens in Edwardian Britain. Each claimed in
contrasting ways to offer an authentic account of the principles of gardening in Japan. While each
emphasised the centrality of ‘landscape’ to gardens in Japan, they did so in different ways. In this paper,
we will consider Conder’s and Farrer’s texts in relation to broader conventions of garden design in
Edwardian Britain, and their influence in the making of Japanese gardens on landed estates in contrasting
sites and regions, at Newstead Abbey, Nottinghamshire, Cowden Castle, Clackmannanshire and
Ingleborough, Yorkshire.
Landscape gardening in Japan
Josiah Conder (1855– 1920) arrived in Japan in 1877 at the invitation of the Meiji government as one
of the oyatoi. Trained as an architect in London, Conder became the first Instructor of Architecture, and
eventually Professor, in the Engineering Department of the new Imperial University, and served as an
advisor to several government departments including those of Public Works, the Interior and Agriculture
and Commerce (Fig. 5). He is credited with introducing western style architecture in Japan, designing
many institutional buildings, including museums, embassies, clubs and churches, and a series of private
mansions, in a variety of European styles—gothic, classical, Tudor, Italianate. Conder married a
Japanese traditional dancing teacher in 1880, and remained in Tokyo for the rest of his life, becoming
more absorbed with Japanese cultural forms, as he spread western forms through his practice (his own
house was a mixture of English and Japanese styles). He learned traditional painting techniques, wrote
on vernacular architecture and published his first book on Japanese flowers and floral arrangement. He
wrote on Japanese gardens in 1886 in the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, the principal
learned society for British residents. Landscape Gardening in Japan was first issued by the Anglo-
Japanese publisher Kelly and Walsh which specialised in books for globe-trotting tourists in 1893 and
reissued in a revised edition in 1912 (Fig. 6).
29
S. Tachibana et al. / Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2004) 364–394 371
Landscape Gardening in Japan was the first serious and systematic exposition of the subject in
English, and proved influential throughout the anglophone world. The word ‘landscape gardening’ had
no equivalent in Japanese and Conder constructed the concept from a variety of garden styles with a
scenic element, from a thousand year history of gardens with varying social and religious functions.
Fig. 5. Photograph of Josiah Conder. Source: T. Fujimori, Nihon no kindai kenchiku (Modern architecture in Japan) (Tokyo
1993).
S. Tachibana et al. / Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2004) 364–394372
Conder based his book on Japanese texts, mainly from the 19th century
30
and on observing historic
gardens, especially the daimyo of the former feudal elite. Many daimyo provided the sites of new
buildings in Tokyo, including those designed by Conder, but some had survived, renovated as grounds
for new mansions.
31
Thus, while the book sampled from Japan’s extensive history and geography of
gardens, it focussed on a period and social stratum concurrent with the classic style of landscape
gardening in the west and sought universal principles to revitalise it. Conder saw his book as a treatise,
Fig. 6. Book cover of Landscape Gardening in Japan (1893).
S. Tachibana et al. / Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2004) 364–394 373
setting out ‘the rules and theories of the Art of Landscape Gardening in Japan’, one which showed
the ‘meaning to methods’ which might otherwise ‘possess merely the empty charm of novelty’ but which
included much that was not ‘peculiar to Japanese design’: ‘beneath the quaint and unfamiliar aspect of
these eastern compositions, there lie universally accepted Art truths’. ‘Robbed of its local garb and
mannerisms’, the Japanese method deployed ‘aesthetic principles applicable to the gardens of any
country’, including a ‘modified form of Western gardening’ (Fig. 7).
32
Landscape Gardening in Japan catalogues the main elements of gardens—stones, lanterns, buildings,
fences, bridges, water features, plants—illustrating their variety in detailed line drawings. It also shows
how they are combined in scenic compositions, with illustrations taken from the texts consulted, modern
lithographs and a supplement of specially commissioned photographs by the ‘well known Japanese
Photographic Artist K. Ogawa’ of the ‘best remaining gardens’ together with ‘natural views’ to make
clearer the ‘faithfully representative character of these artificial landscapes’. While a few photographs
display the compositional structures of traditional Japanese prints, with which western artists strove to
modernise their art, most are conventionally western-style picturesque views, a style which kaika-
conscious Japanese deployed to modernise their art too. Thus, Landscape Gardening in Japan was
carefully primed as both a guide book for those touring gardens in Japan, and as a pattern book for those
who wished to make their own Japanese Garden.
A garden modelled on those in Landscape Gardening in Japan was expensive to make and maintain.
The most famous was that in the grounds of Friar Park, near Henley-on-Thames, constructed around
1906 for the eccentric millionaire Sir Frank Crisp. This was made according to the rules of ‘Hill
Garden—Finished Style’ in Conder’s book. It was the latest addition to a series of miniature gardens at
Friar Park, fully described in the catalogue for the paying public. These included a rock garden for
Fig. 7. ‘Plate XXXI Tea Garden’ in Josiah Conder (1893) Landscape Gardening in Japan.
S. Tachibana et al. / Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2004) 364–394374
alpines with a scale model Matterhorn, and later a Dutch garden, Elizabethan garden and a series of
gardens based on Medieval and Renaissance illustrations. Crisp’s taste for scale model scenery extended
to underground caves, peopled with terracotta gnomes, starting a fashion in garden ornaments with
rivalled that of Japanese tin birds. It became conventional to situate Japanese gardens in such spectacular
geographical and historical series.
33
The gardens described in Landscape Gardening in Japan, along
with much of large scale Edwardian garden design, resonated with the exhibition culture of the time.
Newstead Abbey
The Japanese garden at Newstead Abbey was created between 1899 and 1914 under the direction of
Ethel Webb (1862– 1915) (Fig. 8). Webb was one of a number of wealthy Edwardian women who
practised and promoted advanced garden design and horticultural knowledge; no less than global travel,
it was a display of female independence.
34
Webb took over supervision of the Newstead Abbey estate
upon the death of her father William Fredrick Webb in 1899 and ownership in 1910.
William Frederick Webb spent much of his wealth travelling in Africa and the Far East, exploring and
big-game hunting, reporting on his exploits to the Royal Geographical Society and bringing home
trophies of dead animals and living heroes to the house at Newstead Abbey. David Livingstone, who
rescued an ailing Webb during one expedition, stayed for seven months at Newstead Abbey where he
wrote his second book The Zambesi and its Tributaries.
35
Another noted visitor Sir Roderick Murchison
made a timely observation that the estate was rich in coal measures and income was appreciably
enhanced by leasing land for mines. Webb continued his travels with his daughters, falling fatally ill
during a trip through Egypt. Webb had spent, or rather overspent, the rest of his fortune making
improvements to a house and grounds, famous through its association with a former owner, the poet Lord
Byron.
36
The year before his death, Country Life reported Webb was ‘well versed in gardening’ and had
created a series of different gardens beyond those around the house, gardens devoted to bamboo, azaleas,
alpines, carnations and a Spanish Garden.
37
After his death, his daughters instituted a regime of careful
estate management designed to repair and maintain the grounds and, if possible to raise revenue, by the
sale of lands and planting of trees. Central to this regime was a programme of hydrological
improvement, taking in the many lakes, ponds and conduits. This helped drain lands for pasture and
woodland in the lower part of the grounds and, between the two main lakes, provided a site for the
creation of a Japanese garden set around ponds and cascades.
38
The project for a Japanese garden may have been a family decision, for Japanese screens were brought
back from one trip to the Far East and installed in a Japanese style room, but Ethel Webb, a committed
horticulturalist, is credited with overseeing its creation, and giving it the greatest attention. It seems
much of the work was carried out when she took over ownership of the estate in 1910, the year of the
Japan– British Exhibition. Information on the design of the garden was scarce until detailed notes and
sketches in Ethel Webb’s hand on Newstead Abbey headed notepaper recently came to light. These
show that the garden was largely, and often literally, based on Conder’s Landscape Gardening in Japan.
The sketches are close copies, sometimes transcriptions, of Conder’s directions and illustrations for hill
gardens, water gardening and a Tea Garden. The basic scheme comprises a conventional pairing of
Master’s Isle (Shujin-to) and Guest’s Isle (Kiakujin-to) easily accessible by stepping stones and bridge to
the banks.
39
The Master’s Isle was in Japan appropriated to the owners of the garden, but there is no
evidence this was part of the plan at Newstead (Fig. 9).
S. Tachibana et al. / Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2004) 364–394 375
Fig. 8. Newstead Abbey showing the new rock gardens and Japanese garden, 1890s – 1914.
S. Tachibana et al. / Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2004) 364–394376
A thatched Tea House was built with accompanying ‘rustic well’, in an ensemble designed for the
ritual of the tea ceremony, although it seems to have been used no differently from summerhouses
elsewhere at Newstead, as a place to rest and view scenery. It housed a metal cormorant purchased from
the Exhibition of 1910. The overall layout of the Japanese garden was credited in Country Life to
‘a skilled Japanese horticulturalist brought over for the purpose’.
40
The entrance to the garden by the
cascade from the lake gave a bird’s eye view of its layout. Paths wound around the lake, past a
succession of Japanese plants and trees, including pines, maples, lilies and irises, stone lanterns and
occasional views out into the rest of the grounds.
41
As visitors exited from the garden, up the steps aside
the cascade to the lake, and its Italianate pergola, they were given a spectacular view of the grounds
rising to the gothic house. As in other pleasure grounds of the time, the Japanese garden was part of a
succession of descending gardens, with axes and vistas punctuated by loggias and summerhouses.
42
The Guidebook to Newstead of 1916, issued a year after the death of Ethel Webb, reported that such was
Fig. 9. The first page of Ethel Webb’s manuscript notes, showing the rustic well. Source: Newstead Abbey Collection.
S. Tachibana et al. / Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2004) 364–394 377
the popularity of the Japanese garden, that visits had to be curtailed.
43
In its 1917 feature on Newstead
Country Life reported:
The garden on which the greatest care and attention has been lavished in recent years—before the war,
which has made the upkeep of all the gardens very difficult—is the Japanese… It drew from the
Japanese Ambassador the magnificent compliment that it was the only thing he had seen since he left
Japan which made him feel homesick.
44
Cowden Castle
The Japanese garden at Cowden Castle, Clackmannanshire, on the slopes of the Ochils, was the
creation of Ella Christie (1867– 1944) from a wealthy mine-owning family (Fig. 10). Her father John
Christie emphasised the educational virtues of travel taking Ella and her sister Alice to visit industrial
works as well as places of historic interest in Europe, and insisting they learn foreign languages for
travels abroad. Ella Christie did not marry and took the opportunity to travel throughout Asia. Dressed in
her usual Scottish homespun (meeting her on Dollar Station, a friend thought she was off to Edinburgh
for the day), accompanied by her maid Humphries, and armed with some travel advice from a friend
in the War Office and a few handy phonetic phrases such as Nicki e Dome Banzai ‘Long live Japanese
Fig. 10. Japanese garden at Cowden Castle, Dollar, Clackmannanshire.
S. Tachibana et al. / Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2004) 364–394378
and British alliance’, Ella Christie set out for a year’s sojourn in Japan in 1907, and set down her
impressions in her journal and letters home to her sister.
45
Christie stayed in the old imperial capital of Kyoto in April and the new one of Tokyo the following
month, meeting the Du Cane sisters, Ella and Florence, there to compile material for The Flowers and
Gardens of Japan (1908), who advised her on travel arrangements. Dismayed by ‘the process of
‘Europeanizing’’, ‘I daily long to see the old Japan’, she declared, Christie eagerly visited gardens, both
old ones of temples and daimyo and new ones in a traditional style. She was intrigued by the way new
gardens faithfully copied old ones and the speed at which they gained the patina of age: ‘the whole thing
is laid out with all the marks of positive antiquity’ she wrote to her sister, ‘Not a plant looks as if it had
ever been moved and the mossy stones go on mossing’. She caught the cherry blossom and in Tokyo
‘saw the azaleas and wisteria in their glory’ and regretted missing the irises by a week. With Ella Du
Cane, ‘one of the few women one can travel with’, and a native boy guide, she took a nine hour walking
tour around Mount Fuji. ‘The path was a mere track through a tangle of shrubbery quite lovely in variety.
We passed camphor trees, the largest thing in timber that I have ever seen, deutzias, camellias,
hydrangeas, tiny roses, and bamboos’. From the outset, Ella Christie was on the look out for ideas to
create a garden at Cowden.
I went to see a temple on which is a show of wisteria, the flowers about eighteen inches long
and trained on verandahs over the water. Miss Du Cane came to paint it. If feasible I shall bring
a Jap home to lay out my pond. It could be a dream of beauty…
46
While in Japan, Christie wrote to Josiah Conder for advice about designing a garden at home at
Cowden Castle. He cautioned her against using Tokyo gardeners, for they ‘lack both organization and
acquaintance with matters of foreign export’ and she would also be put into the ‘hands of guides or
unreliable interpreters’. Conder advised her to apply to the Yokahama Nursery Company; there she
would find ‘English speaking experts acquainted will all branches of gardening who will if asked, I
think, supply you with suitable Japanese designs for gardens as well as advising you upon selections of
trees, shrubs, stones, lanterns, etc.’ (Fig. 11).
47
The pond at Cowden Christie wanted to transform into a Japanese garden had been made out of a
marshy field. It was over half a mile from the house, well beyond other gardens, but the very isolation
and backdrop of woodland and misty hills gave it a romantic aura, which she wished to enhance. She
employed Taki Honda, from the Royal School of Garden Design at Nagoya to create ‘a real Japanese
garden’.
Realizing the possibilities of the somewhat uninteresting stretch of ground about the lake, and how, if
the breath of life were breathed into it, it would become a living soul, I found a Japanese woman who
would undertake the task and wave the magic wand. For six weeks she toiled and planned, while to the
untrained eye apparently shapeless mounds arose, and stones were sought for and found and placed in
the orthodox grouping.
48
Part of the layout was planned according to the so called ‘ancient rule’ of the Imperial Palace Gardens,
other parts copied from Conder’s Landscape Gardening in Japan (Fig. 12). As at Newstead Abbey, a
Master’s Isle and Guest’s Isle were created according to the conventions of water gardening. The
approach was marked by an early 19th century granite lantern imported from a Kyoto antique dealer,
S. Tachibana et al. / Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2004) 364–394 379
who provided detailed advice about maintaining moss, if local insect hunting wrens ensured it did not
survive. A red lacquered torii, the pergola-like Shinto shrine structure, was imported in sections. One
embankment was modelled to denote the slopes of Fuji-yama. Local limestone was shaped into scores of
symbolic stones, carefully positioned to articulate the space as (in Christie’s phrase) a ‘sacred domain’.
Plants were selected with a view to their successful establishment, so native evergreens were mixed with
exotics, including Korean pines raised from seed she collected on her travels, and substitutes sought
Fig. 11. Ella Christie standing in the Japanese garden at Cowden Castle, c.1930. Source: Private Collection of Robert Stewart.
Fig. 12. Photograph of the Japanese garden at Cowden Castle, showing the bridge c.1930. Source: Private collection of Robert
Stewart.
S. Tachibana et al. / Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2004) 364–394380
for Japanese plants, for example, laburnum in the place of wisteria. Vistas were cut through beechwoods
to reveal the surrounding hills and moorland. Its name Sha-rak-uen, ‘a place of pleasure and delight’,
was inscribed at the entrance.
49
The Japanese garden was modified over the years, for the rest of Christie’s life, attracting a stream of
visitors, local gentry keen to try the style, Edinburgh celebrities and fellow globe-trotters, including
minor European aristocrats. She employed a Japanese designer Suzuki for occasional consultations.
Suzuki was a Professor at the Zen Soami School of Imperial Design in Nagoya who also stayed for long
periods in London to give advice on Japanese plants and gardens throughout Britain, increasingly so in
the 1930s as the fashion for Japanese gardens in Britain waned, and financial conditions in Japan meant
that ‘gentlemen do not spend money on their gardens’.
50
He used Conder’s book in his advice for
Cowden, but, as with his recommendation of the zig-zag bridge (yatsu-hashi) modified it with
supplementary historical and literary evidence (Fig. 13). He assured her that in his opinion, and that of
knowledgeable visitors, it was one of the best in the western world. On Suzuki’s recommendation,
Christie employed a Japanese gardener Shinzaburo Matsuo, who had worked on other gardens in
Europe. Matsuo never learned English but communicated largely by sign language; one visitor to
Cowden recalled Christie and Matsuo ‘standing together by a bed of irises, deep in a kind of hybrid
conversation’.
51
Fig. 13. Suzuki’s letter to Ella Christie, showing design plan of the zig-zag bridge. Source: Stewart-Christie Papers, Acc 5058,
National Library of Scotland.
S. Tachibana et al. / Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2004) 364–394 381
Rock garden truth
Reginald Farrer (1880– 1920) travelled to Japan in 1903, where he was inspired to reform the tradition
of English rock gardening (Fig. 14). He became interested in mountain plants as a boy roaming the
limestone hills of his family’s estate at Ingleborough, Yorkshire, to collect and catalogue specimens,
Fig. 14. Photograph of Reginald Farrer. Source: Illingworth J and Routh J (Eds). Reginald Farrer: Dalesman, Planthunter,
Gardener (Lancaster 1991).
S. Tachibana et al. / Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2004) 364–394382
recording some for the first time. At St John’s College, Oxford, he found in the Bursar, Henry Jardine
Bidder, a fellow enthusiast for alpine flora and he helped Bidder make the extensive rock garden there.
After graduating in 1902, Farrer set off on the first of his long journeys to the Far East in 1903,
embarking on a consciously strenuous life of plant collecting, mainly in mountainous regions of Asia
and Europe. The Craven Nursery he ran on the family estate, stocked with some of the plants he
collected, was not a commercial success, and while he publicised the rock gardens he created there, his
parents, concerned with the management of the estate as a whole, were reluctant to underwrite his
horticultural enthusiasms. His expeditions were largely funded with proceeds from his writings, articles
for magazines and books on travel and horticulture, and later sponsorship from a syndicate of garden
enthusiasts, including the Royal Horticultural Society and several private patrons. Farrer converted to
Buddhism on a trip to Sri Lanka in 1907. Later in his life, he became known as a painter of alpine plants
in their habitats, exhibiting over 200 watercolours at the Fine Art Society in 1918. He died 2 years later
during a plant hunting expedition in the Sino-Himalayas.
52
Farrer was a singular figure in the horticultural world of Edwardian Britain, but in many ways a
traditional one, following enterprising plant-huntsmen and nurserymen like Veitch and Fortune. Rock
gardening, and a taste for mountainous plants, had been stimulated and reshaped in Japan by the
reception of John Ruskin’s writings, which are also (despite his disclaimers) a discernible influence on
Farrer’s sensibility, and a Society for the Study of Alpine Plants was established in Tokyo in 1902.
53
Farrer published his account of his first trip to the Far East as The Garden of Asia: Impressions from
Japan (1904). ‘My object has been to give true pictures rather than elaborate statistics. I have tried to
render Japan as I saw it and felt it; not Japan as manuals and guide books try to present it’. Farrer sought
out a range of gardens, including daimyo gardens and nurseries, but focussed on those hitherto unseen or
overlooked by globe-trotting tourists or design books. Searching for a residence, he came across a
typically modest garden in Tokyo, ‘perhaps three yards square’.
It was not ambitious. It did not aspire to rivulets and bridges and paraphernalia. But it was
perfect. There were little bushes of azalea, and primeval-looking mossy stones that had all the
effect of rocks, and a peeping fern, and mother-of-thousands, and tufts of grass, and a tree of the
lovely Camellia sasanqua, with rose-pink blossoms like an enormous dog rose.
54
More fascinating still was witnessing the way such gardens could be rapidly assembled. Farrer’s
residence proved to have only a few overgrown and sick-looking plants, so he ordered a new garden.
Workmen brought mature trees and shrubs for background and built piles of rock work, where they
carefully positioned smaller plants, ‘till the whole had the air of a rocky clearing in a jungle’. While
plants were carefully cultivated, rocks and stones were more coveted than flowers, with highly priced
‘precious stones’ from particular rivers that looked like ‘common pebbles’ to the ‘untutored eye’. ‘The
Japanese garden is a paradise of stones rather than blossom. If a flower happened to come, well and
good; but its bush was not put there to blossom so much as to set off the contrast between two lines of
rock’. ‘A good Japanese garden of the ordinary sort is one where the rocks are of perfect size, shape and
disposition to replicate a landscape’; such rock gardens were ‘very different from the careful cossetting-
ground for ill-tempered little Alpine plants that we mean by the name’.
55
The very stringent use of plants in Japan presented Farrer with an opportunity. He wrote home to his
mother:
S. Tachibana et al. / Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2004) 364–394 383
I am literally dazed and staggered at the possibilities for border plants and especially Alpines. Japan is
an absolutely virgin country! The few plants which are occasionally introduced from Japan by Veitch
and so forth, with much blowing of trumpet, and at a preposterous price, are not found by them in the
wilds of the mountains but in the cabbage gardens of Tokyo and Kyoto. All this I got from Alfred
Unger [the head of Boehmer’s Nursery Company] here, who does not know the importance rock
gardening has assumed in England, and told me, that as Alpines have no commercial value, no one has
ever approached the Alpine Flora of Japan. Now we know what a commercial value they have in
England, so what a business opening for a person with discernment—and money!
56
As well as seeking out alpine plants in the wild, Farrer was excited to find sturdy specimens on the stalls
of the night fairs of Tokyo.
And there, before my eyes, in the streets of Tokio, shone the high alpine, unmistakable—stout rosettes
of leathery, Galax-like leaves, and tall stems each carrying a dozen flowers or so—nodding great
fringy bells, rose-pink, and marbled with crimson—far more dainty and more gorgeous than any
Soldanella that ever pierced the snow. Of course I fell upon the treasure (so utterly different from the
stunted little miseries that so far had represented Schizocodon’s best efforts in England) and ordered
hundreds. They arrived next day—stalwart, tall-growing, splendid clumps, costing two pence each or
so. My heart was filled with joy, and I sent them off to Yokohama to be packed for home. And there in
the summer heats of that unutterable place, they all sickened and died.
57
Farrer reported this in his second and most popular book, My Rock Garden, first published in 1907,
when he was able to add that he had now received at Ingleborough ‘another lot of excellent plants’,
although he was ‘beginning to look upon them anxiously’ (Fig. 15). Farrer found a number of glorious
plants ‘always more or less at war with me and my soil’ and resented the success of others like
Mr Hindmarsh of Newcastle who managed to make the ‘melancholy, shy rooted’ Shortia uniflora grow
‘like a groundsel’ and showed off their success in the photographs in horticultural journals. Farrer had
now received a ‘superb importation’ of S. uniflora from Japan which he had planted out and was hopeful
of thriving, recalling the first time he saw the plant, pointed out by a hotelkeeper in Shoji, ‘six miles or
more across the country, in the dense pall of jungle that flows so royally down the western slope of Fuji-
yama’. Farrer himself collected a Japanese variety of Cypripedium from the slopes of the mountain, ‘as
beautiful a thing as Fuji-yama ever held forth’. He secured a ‘goodly batch’ and a photograph in the book
shows a Ruskin-style close-up view of the plant in the rock garden, ‘three months after arrival from
Japan’ (Fig. 16). My Rock Garden advocates a combination of Japanese regard for imitative rock scenery
and English regard for flowers. The ideal rock garden would be
A Japanese garden stocked with European alpines; and when I say Japanese garden, I don’t mean a
silly jungle of bamboos, with Tori, and a sham tea-house, and Irises and a trellis—I mean a rocky
glen, a pinnacled flank of mountain such as every other cottage in Kioto possesses, and had possessed
for half a dozen generations.
Farrer would thus reform the ‘shapeless, anarchic ideal’ of the English rock garden ‘held up for
imitation by extremists of the Landscape school’. Moreover, Farrer criticised the entire tradition of
S. Tachibana et al. / Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2004) 364–394384
the ‘Jardin Anglais—sham landscape, sham wildness, sham ruins, wobbling walks, pagodas, lakes,
pools—you will find it all in Headlong Hall and Sense and Sensibility’.
57
After his Buddhist pilgrimage to Ceylon in 1907, Farrer adopted a more metaphysical if more broadly
orientalist view of Japanese gardens. Faced with the increasing craze for Japanese gardens in the wake of
the 1910 exhibition, ‘Japanolatory’ he called it, Farrer set out his views of a more respectful use of
the culture of gardens in Japan.
58
The Royal International Horticultural Society Exhibition of 1912,
Fig. 15. Book cover of My Rock Garden (Lancaster 1893).
S. Tachibana et al. / Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2004) 364–394 385
the first since 1866, showed a series of Japanese gardens. In his catalogue essay on ‘Rock Gardens and
Garden Design’, Farrer took the opportunity to pronounce on the fashion, and spell out a broader views
of gardening in England.
Only in the last 30 years, as it finally freed itself from the dead hand of continental culture, had there
been ‘an original sense of garden design in England’, Farrer claimed. The ‘rooted, personal passion for
flowers’ was nowhere matched ‘on this side of China’, save for ‘our kinsmen in Holland’. The Far East
also offered better lessons of scenic representation than in conventional English landscape gardening.
‘The East has sadly mocked our ignorance in this matter’, he observed.
The ‘Japanese’ gardens at the White City [Exhibition of 1910] were quite the most cruel and insolent
practical jokes that I have ever seen leveled at our native innocence—vast puddings of unrelated
pebbles, shapeless, ridiculous, peppered with toys and bronzes and haphazard shrubs. How their
creators must have laughed in the building… ‘Very pretty’ said a Japanese Ambassador one day in
England, wishing to say pleasant things about a famous ‘Japanese’ garden through which he was
being conveyed by its complacent owner. ‘Very pretty, yes. We have nothing like this in Japan!’.
‘We have never yet in England seen any fair or reasonable reproduction of a Japanese garden’ because of
the ‘wrongheadedness of ‘copying’ Japanese gardens’, he continued.
The West copies by sitting in front of a model and imitating it soullessly, outward line by line. When
the copy is finished, nothing remains in it of the spirit that had inspired the original. The East…
Fig. 16. Photograph of ‘Cypripedium Macranthum’ from My Rock Garden (London 1907).
S. Tachibana et al. / Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2004) 364–394386
‘copies’ by sitting in front of an original, absorbing it, studying it, grasping its principles and its
essential greatness thoroughly; then by going on to translate these acquisitions into more or less new
form, in terms of one’s own taste and time… This is rather translation than ‘copying’ as we
understand the word; and it is even more indeed than we mean by translation… Oriental copying is a
perpetual renewal of life. Moving perpetually through varying manifestations and developments…
And this is the only sense in which I could bear to talk of ‘copying’ a Japanese garden. Very likely we
should arrive at something not resembling any one of them.
Such a garden might be incorporated in an English– Japanese collaboration:
Let Mr Lutyens or Detmar Blow endeavour to fit some Surrey villa of their building with a
congruous rock garden… the result, if they are worth their names, would fund its triumph rooted
in discovery or intuition of Oriental knowledge and balance. With the aid of Mr Yamanaka
[a London antique dealer] and Mr Markino [the resident painter] (but without their tongues in
cheek) the result would be yet more striking and illuminating.
Oriental harmony and modesty would help close the division between art and life, make us appreciate
that expensive things were not more beautiful in themselves than ‘a farthing paper fan from Kyoto’.
All this is true of our gardens. They are not part of ourselves; they are things we buy… Go round the
International, in amazement at the wonderful paradises for sale. But they are not yet inspired, they are
not yet fertile. How are they to become so? Why, if we care to make them works of art, our very caring
will help make them so… It will all come from a recognition of rock garden truth, its dignity and high
possibility, as well as from the engendering of a race of men more specially fitted to cope with it by
long and profound contemplation of the principles and unities and rhythms that the art of the East
(especially) holds most readily at the command of students in every department of its existence.
59
Ingleborough
The Ingleborough fells above Clapham, Yorkshire, were already renowned for their limestone
scenery and alpine plants when James Farrer, a lawyer in London, purchased the Ingleborough
estate in the 18th century (Fig. 17).
60
In the early 19th century the grounds were landscaped in a
picturesque style, with a lake and woodland walk to the show caves for increasing numbers of
tourists. Reginald Farrer’s father James Anson Farrer (1849– 1923), a progressive landowner,
undertook a campaign of improvements including hydraulic engineering of the lake and waterfalls
and extensive timber-tree planting, which made the estate increasingly profitable. James Anson
Farrer was also a noted Liberal and anti-imperialist, writing a series of comparative studies of
culture, religion and ethnicity, which may well have influenced the views of his son. Reginald
Farrer was committed to the estate he was due to inherit, and close to his parents, but his letters
home from his frequent and prolonged plant hunting trips abroad reveal frictions about the
resources his father was prepared to grant him, both in money and space, and the control they were
prepared to allow him planting and gardening the estate
61
.
S. Tachibana et al. / Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2004) 364–394 387
Fig. 17. Ingleborough Hall, Clapham, Yorkshire.
S. Tachibana et al. / Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2004) 364–394388
Farrer’s gardening at Ingleborough took two forms. In the lower part of the grounds, below the
mansion, he created two enclosed rock gardens, with large limestone boulders brought down from
the fells. The so-called Old Garden was on the site of a former quarry (Fig. 18). Boulders were positioned
to create miniature glens for alpines and a pond constructed, although this was removed to create a boggy
bed to raise irises. As he noted in My Rock Garden plants seldom thrived here on the thin soils, ‘died,
Fig. 18. Photograph of ‘Old Rock Garden’ from My Rock Garden (London 1907).
S. Tachibana et al. / Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2004) 364–394 389
sulked, sat still’. By contrast, even delicate plants transported long distances thrived in the New Garden,
built against the walls of a former kitchen garden and forming the lower part of his Craven Nursery.
Plants grew precociously in the ‘good fat soil’ resulting from the site’s former use. Here Farrer
positioned four big blocks of stone to create another gorge landscape, filled with stone chips for sharp
drainage and topped with good soil.
62
In the actual gorge above the house, Farrer modified the semi-
natural woodland with exotics. The path followed the north side of the Craven Fault crossing a small
outlier of acid soils. Here Farrer established the varieties of rhododendrons, bamboos and azaleas he
collected. This garden was accented by a single stone bridge taking the path over the beck, a so called
‘Chinese Bridge’, confirming its generally oriental character. Farrer quarrelled with his parents about
management when he has away. ‘For the 10 or 12 parties who are annually shown my Cliff, you have
four or five hundred who are allowed up to see the cave, so do leave off the attempt to make a grievance
of that’, he complained in 1910 ‘You are spoiling my work; making it hideous and ridiculous… leave me
my valley, rocks and cliff; go and stick Polygonums elsewhere. You have fourteen thousand acres: leave
me two!’ In 1920, the year of his death plant-hunting in the Himalayas, he wrote that ‘we must go on
improving the collection’ and in another 10 years, ‘the place will become a show-garden… people who
on account of my books expect to see a fine garden at Ingleborough simply laugh’.
63
Conclusion
The gardens at Newstead Abbey, Cowden Castle and Ingleborough were expressions of the
confidence in the culture of gardening in Japan to revision and revive that in Britain, and in this there are
significant continuities with a longer cultural history of gardening in Britain. The Japanese gardens at
Newstead and Cowden performed like the classically inspired gardens in 18th century landscape parks,
with their statues, inscriptions, temples and meditative lakeside walks. Inspired by the Grand Tours of
the day, such gardens were designed to evoke an aura of antique virtue, of a glorious imperial culture.
Like Georgian grand tourists, the globe-trotters of the Edwardian era also attempted to reclaim a heritage
which they saw as betrayed by contemporary developments, if this was not the degenerate Italy and
Greece which dismayed 18th century gentlemen, but the modern, westernized Japan. The gardens at
Newstead and Cowden were consciously rule governed, following designs in Conder’s Landscape
Gardening in Japan, using native born Japanese designers and consultants and commercially made
ornaments and structures.
Reginald Farrer struck the traditional posture of landed gentlemen who prided themselves on
manfully going it alone in their own garden designs, without recourse to pattern books, consultants,
metropolitan fashion, or limitless funds. Indeed his disenchantment with fashionably theatrical 18th
century gardening is reminiscent of those quarrelsome picturesque theorists Uvedale Price and Richard
Payne Knight, who prided themselves on both superior, cosmopolitan landscape connoisseurship and a
careful regard for the native plants and local ecology of their estates.
64
Farrer deployed his first hand
observation of Japanese plants and Japanese culture to mount a critique of the vogue for ‘Japanese
gardens’. A more authentic appreciation of the garden culture of Japan, including its conventions of
copying, would encourage the cultivation of scenic gardens which might not seem recognisably
Japanese at all.
In enhancing the idea of imperial landscape, the craze for Japanese gardens in Edwardian Britain
echoed that for Chinese gardens in the Georgian period. The principal 18th century advocate of ‘oriental
S. Tachibana et al. / Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2004) 364–394390
gardening’, Sir William Chambers in the guise of ‘Tan Chet-Qua Gent.’, argued that if British
landowners adopted the ‘manner’ of Chinese gardens, they could exceed their stature:
the whole kingdom might soon become one magnificent vast Garden, bounded only by the
sea…an empire transformed into a splendid Garden, with the imperial mansion towering on an
eminence in the center, and the palaces of the nobles, scattered like pleasure pavilions amongst the
plantations, infinitely surpasses any thing that even the Chinese ever attempted.
65
Chinoiserie, although resisted by garden theorists and designers who cleaved to more local, native
styles, reshaped the idea of English gardening, especially in Europe.
66
Not all exotic designs were
successfully assimilated. In 1805, Humphry Repton, as ambitious as Chambers to turn the whole
country into one landscape garden, confidently predicted that the popularity of the scenery and
architecture of India would promise a ‘great future change’ in English landscape gardening. Repton
was soon proved wrong as the Napoleonic Wars drained the resources of clients for landscape gardens
of any kind.
67
The craze for specialist Japanese gardens declined with the fashion for many kinds of expensive
gardening during the First World War. After the war anti-Japanese sentiment in Britain increased, a
reflection of hostility in the dominions, especially Australia and Canada, to Japanese expansion. The
Anglo-Japanese alliance was formally terminated in 1923. The Second World War dealt a lasting blow
to popular British regard for Japanese culture. Post war gardening in Britain was consciously vernacular,
if the plant stock was full of naturalised exotics. Now, with a popular enthusiasm for ‘traditional’ oriental
culture and a vogue for design-conscious gardens, Japanese gardens in Britain are undergoing a revival.
Japanese gardens of the Edwardian period are being rediscovered and restored and new ones created.
Moreover, English style gardens along with soccer, classic clothes and landscape imagery are now
fashionable in Japan.
68
Acknowledgements
We wish to thank John and Joan Farrer for showing us Reginald Farrer’s gardens and grounds at
Clapham and discussing the landscape history of the Ingleborough Estate, Clapham, Yorkshire;
Robert Stewart for providing information and showing the Japanese garden at Cowden Castle,
Dollar, Clackmannanshire; and Haidee Jackson (Keeper of the collection at Newstead Abbey,
Nottinghamshire) and Helen Ward, (Lindley Library at Royal Horticultural Society) for their help
with primary sources.
Notes
1. Josiah Conder, in: C. Lancaster (Ed.), Landscape Gardening in Japan, New York, 1964, 13 – 41, Supplement (np).
2. Reginald Farrer, My Rock Garden, London, 1904, 234.
3. On contact zones and transculturation, see M.L. Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, London, 1992,
esp. 6-7; On the broader process of cultural exchange between Japan and Britain, see S. Tachibana, Travel, plants and
cross-cultural landscapes: British representations of Japan 1860 – 1914, Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of
Nottingham, 2000.
S. Tachibana et al. / Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2004) 364–394 391
4. A. Herries, Japanese Gardens in Britain, Princes Risborough, 2001; B. Elliott, Victorian Gardens, London, 1986,
199–202; D. Ottewill, The Edwardian Garden, New Haven and London, 1989, 55 –58; J. Conway, Japanese influences on
English gardens, Unpublished Thesis submitted for the Conservation course at the Architectural Association, London,
1988.
5. A. Jackson, Imagining Japan: the Victorian perception of Japanese culture, Journal of Design History 5 (1996) 245 – 256;
On the United States, including Japanese gardens, see C. Lancaster, The Japanese Influence in America, New York, 1983.
6. R. Fortune, Yedo and Peking; A Narrative of A Journey to the Capitals of Japan and China, London, 1863; J.G. Veitch,
From the Mr J.G. Veitch’s letters, The Gardener’s Chronicle, 1860 –1862; Appendix E. Notes on the agriculture, trees, and
flora of Japan, by Veitch in R. Alcock, The Capital of Tycoon, Vol. II, London, 1863, 490 – 495.
7. On activities of plant collectors and nurseries, J.H. Veitch, Hortus Veitchii, London, 1906; A.M. Coats, The Quest for
Plants, London, 1969; Y. Shirahata, Puranto-hanta (Plant Hunters), Tokyo, 1994.
8. W.J. Bean, Trees and Shrubs Hardy in the British Isles, vol. I – III, London, 1947; H.J. Elwes and A. Henry, The Trees of
Great Britain and Ireland, vol. II, Edinburgh, 1907; S. Tachibana, Travel, plants and cross-cultural landscapes: British
representations of Japan 1860– 1914, Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2000, 120 –146; A. Herries,
Japanese Gardens in Britain, Princes Risborough, 2001, 14– 18.
9. A. Helmreich, Re-presenting nature: ideology, art and science in William Robinson’s ‘Wild Garden’, in: J. Wolschke-
Bulmahn (Ed.), Nature and Ideology: Natural Garden Design in the Twentieth Century, Washington, DC, 1997,
81–112; R. Preston, ‘The scenery of the torrid zone’: imagined travels and the culture of exotics in nineteenth century
British gardens, in: F. Driver and D. Gilbert (Eds), Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity, Manchester, 1999,
194–215.
10. R. Carrington, Alexandra Park and Palace: A History, London, 1975, 34.
11. C. Clunas, Nature and ideology in western descriptions of the Chinese garden, in: J. Wolschke-Bulmahn (Ed.), Nature and
Ideology: Natural Garden Design in the Twentieth Century, Washington, DC, 1997, 21 – 35.
12. P. Lowe, Great Britain and Japan 1911 –15: A Study in British Far Eastern Policy, London, 1969.
13. P. Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: the Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851 – 1939,
Manchester, 1988, 74, 96, 148.
14. T. Shimada, et al. (Eds), Za Yatoi: O-yatoi-gaikokujin no sogoteki kenkyuu (The Yatoi: A Comprehensive Study of Hired
Foreigners), Kyoto, 1987; A.W. Burks (Ed.), The Modernizers: Overseas Students, Foreign Employees and Meiji Japan,
London, 1985.
15. J. Iinuma, Y. Shirahata, Nihon bunka to shite no koen (Public Park as Japanese cultures), Tokyo, 1993; H. Maruyama,
Kindai Nihon Koen-shi no Kenkyu (Study of the History of the Japanese Modern Public Park), Kyoto, 1994; H. Suzuki,
Tokyo no (chirei Genius loci) (Genius loci in Tokyo), Tokyo, 1990; Y. Shirahata, Daimyo Teien (Gardens of Daimyo),
Tokyo, 1997; Tachibana, Travel, plants and cross-cultural landscapes, 42 – 55; J. Hendry, Nature tamed: gardens as
a microcosm of Japan’s view of the world, in: P.J. Asquith and A. Kalland (Eds), Japanese Images of Nature: Cultural
Perspectives, London, 1997, 83– 106, quotations on 99 – 101.
16. M. Kimura, Einichi Rasukin kanshin hikaku (Comparative interest in Ruskin between England and Japan) in Idem., John
Ruskin and Victorian Art, Tochigi, 1993; T. Watanabe (Ed.), Ruskin in Japan 1890 – 1940: Nature of Art, Art for Life,
Sheffield, 1997.
17. H. Kato, A. Maeda, Meiji Media-ko (Studies of Meiji Media), Tokyo, 1983; Tachibana, Travel, plants and cross-cultural
landscapes, 30–56; J. Harada, The Gardens of Japan, London, 1928; B. Taylor (H Osgood), Japanese Gardens, London,
1912.
18. The Gardeners’ Chronicle, 28 September 1907, 234; A. Herries, Japanese Gardens in Britain, Princes Risborough, 2001,
32–34; B. Elliot, Japanese nurseries and export trade, in: A. Farrer (Ed.), A Garden Bequest—Plants from Japan, London,
2001, 19–22.
19. A. Parsons, Notes in Japan, London, 1986; On Parsons’ Japanese sojourn, see N. Milette, Landscape painter as landscape
gardener: the career of Alfred Parsons RA, Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of York, 1997, 190 – 199.
20. M. Yoshio, Japanese Artist in London, London, 1910; T. Sato and T. Watanabe, Japan and Britain: An Aesthetic Dialogue
1850– 1930, London, 1999.
21. J. Hudson, A Japanese garden in England, Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society 32 (1907) 1 –10.
22. A. Hotta-Lister, The Japan – British Exhibition of 1910: Gateway to the Island Empire of the East, London, 1999.
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23. Ozawa also designed a ‘Japanese garden’ at Hibiya public park in 1889, one of the first western style public parks
planned by Tokyo City. This park also had an English landscape garden, a French formal style garden and carpet
flower bedding.
24. Gardening at the Japan-British Exhibition, The Gardeners’ Chronicle, 24 September 1910, 227 – 228; Japanese gardening,
The Gardeners’ Magazine, 9 July 1910, 530– 532; Official Report of the Japan– British Exhibition at the Great White City,
London, 1911.
25. A. Herries, Japanese Gardens in Britain, Princes Risborough, 2001, 21.
26. Herries Japanese Gardens in Britain, 37.
27. G. Jekyll, Garden Ornament, London, 1918, 449– 452.
28. P.S. Hayward, The new theory in garden design, The Gardeners’ Magazine, 28 January 1911, 68; in the same vein see also
his Japanese art in English gardens, The Gardeners’ Magazine, 6 March 1909, 187; The Japanese ideal, The Gardeners’
Magazine, 14 July 1909, 580; The Japanese ideal in practice, The Gardeners’ Magazine, 8 July 1911, 408; Ornamentation
in the Japanese garden, The Gardeners’ Magazine, 27 December 1913, 978. We owe these references to Elliott, 265-6,
n. 73.
29. D. Finn, Josiah Conder (1852 –1920) and Meiji architecture, in: H. Cortazzi, G. Daniels (Eds), Britain and Japan 1859 –
1991, 1991, London, 1852, 86– 91; T. Watanabe, Vernacular expression or western style: Josiah Conder and the beginning
of modern architectural design in Japan, in: N.C. Bowe (Ed.), Art and the Natural Dream, Duke, 1993, 43 – 52; J. Conder,
in: C. Lancaster (Ed.), Landscape Gardening in Japan, New York, 1964, vi – vii.
30. K. Ono and W. Edwards, Landscape gardening in Japan in shirusareta ‘Tsukiyama Teizoden’ (Zenpen) shosai no yakuseki
(Garden stone terms in Tsukiyama-teizoden described in Landscape Gardening in Japan), Nihon teien gakkaishi (Journal
of the Academic Society of Japanese Garden) 8 (1999) 26– 32.
31. T. Fujimori, Meiji no Tokyo keikaku (Tokyo planning in Meiji), Tokyo, 1982; T. Fujimori, Nihon no Kindai kenchiku
(Modern architecture in Japan), Tokyo, 1993.
32. Josiah Conder, in: C. Lancaster (Ed.), Landscape Gardening, 15.
33. Herries, Japanese Gardens in Britain, 26 – 27 B. Elliott, Victorian Gardens, London, 1986, 228 – 229. D. Ottewill, The
Edwardian Garden, New Haven and London, 989, 55.
34. D. Kellaway (Ed.), The Illustrated Virago Book of Gardeners, London, 1995, 8 – 15.
35. A.Z. Fraser, Livingstone and Newstead, London, 1913.
36. R. Coope, The Webb family of Newstead Abbey, Transactions of the Thoroton Society 105 (2001) 137 – 154.
37. Newstead Abbey, Nottinghamshire, Country Life Illustrated, 26 February 1898, 242 –243.
38. Memorandum on the Administration of the Newstead and Cawton Estates, 1899 – 1915, 1915; Household Account Book.
Newstead Abbey Acc 1122/12-13; W.F. Webb, Obituary, Mansfield Reporter, 3 March 1899.
39. Newstead Abbey collection, Nottinghamshire.
40. Newstead Abbey, Nottinghamshire, Country Life, 24 November 1917, 492 – 497.
41. A.J. Lloyd, Guide to Newstead Abbey, Nottingham, 1916; Memoirs of Miss Webb, Newstead Abbey Acc 3153 1133/6.
42. D. Ottewill, The Edwardian Garden, New Haven and London, 1989, 104 – 105.
43. A.J. Lloyd, Guide to Newstead Abbey, Nottingham, 1916, 44.
44. Newstead Abbey, Nottinghamshire, Country Life, 24 November 1917, 492 – 497 (497).
45. E. Christie and A. Stewart, A Long Look at Life, by Two Victorians, London, 1940, 17 –56; A. Stewart, ‘Alicella’: A Memoir
of Alice King Stewart and Ella Christie, London, 1955, 3 – 20, 188 –189.
46. A. Stewart, ‘Alicella’: A Memoir of Alice King Stewart and Ella Christie, London, 1955, 203 –210.
47. Josiah Conder to Ella Christie 9 May 1907, Stewart Christie Papers, Acc 5058, National Library of Scotland.
48. E. Christie and A. Stewart, A Long Look at Life, by Two Victorians, London, 1940, 234 – 235.
49. Box 10, XIII, Miscellaneous, Stewart Christie Papers; E. Christie and A. Stewart, A Long Look at Life, by Two Victorians,
London, 1940, 234– 239; A. Stewart, ‘Alicella’: A Memoir of Alice King Stewart and Ella Christie, London, 1955, 210 –
216; E. Christie, Japanese gardens, Dollar Magazine (nd), 164 – 166; R. Stewart, The Japanese Gardens at Cowden, Dollar,
1955.
50. J. Suzuki to Ella Christie, 18 December 1932, Stewart Christie Papers.
51. Stewart, ‘Alicella’, 216.
52. J. Illingworth and J. Routh (Eds), Reginald Farrer: Dalesman, Planthunter, Gardener, 1991, Occasional Paper 19, Centre
for North-west Regional Studies, Lancaster University.
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53. T. Watanabe (Ed.), Ruskin in Japan 1890 – 1940: Nature of Art, Art for Life, Sheffield, 1997, 374.
54. R. Farrar, The Garden of Asia: Impressions from Japan, London, 1904, 15.
55. Farrer, The Garden of Asia, x, 15 – 16, 23.
56. Quoted in J.L. Illingworth, The correspondence of Reginald Farrer, in: J. Illingworth and J. Routh (Eds), Reginald Farrer:
Dalesman, Planthunter, Gardener, 1991, Occasional Paper 19, Centre for North-west Regional Studies, Lancaster
University, 72–80 (74).
57. R. Farrer, My Rock Garden, London, 1904, 233 – 234, 277– 288,10, 4.
58. Reginald Farrer, On Japanese gardens, The Gardeners’ Chronicle, 2 November 1912, 330 –331.
59. R. Farrer, Rock gardens and garden design, in: R. Cory (Ed.), The Horticultural Record, London, 1914, 3 – 18 (14,15,18).
60. J. Roberts, Alpine plants in the Ingleborough area, in: J. Illingworth and J. Routh (Eds), Reginald Farrer: Dalesman,
Planthunter, Gardener, 1991, Occasional Paper 19, Centre for North-west Regional Studies, Lancaster University, 89 –93.
61. S. Mason, The Ingleborough estate: home of Reginald Farrer, in: J. Illingworth and J. Routh (Eds), Reginald Farrer:
Dalesman, Planthunter, Gardener, 1991, Occasional Paper 19, Centre for North-west Regional Studies, Lancaster
University, 81–89.
62. Farrer, My Rock Garden, 10 –15.
63. Quoted J.L. Illingworth, The correspondence of Reginald Farrer, in: J. Illingworth and J. Routh (Eds), Reginald Farrer:
Dalesman, Planthunter, Gardener, 1991, Occasional Paper 19, Centre for North-west Regional Studies, Lancaster
University, 76, 78.
64. S. Daniels, C. Watkins, Picturesque landscaping and estate management: Uvedale Price at Foxley, 1770 – 1829, Rural
History 2 (1991) 141– 169; Idem, The Picturesque Landscape: Visions of Georgian Herefordshire, Nottingham, 1994.
65. W. Chambers, A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening, to which is annexed An Explanatory Discourse by Tat Chet-Qua, of
Quang-Chew-Fu, Gent London, 1773, 133– 134.
66. O. Siren, in: H. Honour (Ed.), China and Gardens of Europe, Washington, DC, 1990.
67. S. Daniels, Humphry Repton: Landscape Gardening and the Geography of Georgian England, New Haven, 1999,
181–205.
68. Herries, Japanese Gardens in Britain; R. Alexander, A natural affinity: the Japanese and British connection, in: A.Farrer
(Ed.), A Garden Bequest—Plants from Japan, London, 2001, 23–26; D. Cosgrove and S. Daniels (Eds), Fukei no Zuzogaku
(The Iconography of Lanscape), translated by M. Senda and T. Uchida, Kyoto, 2001; J. Potter, Lost Gardens, London,
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