Translated for THE CHAUTAUQUAN, from “Revue des Deux Mondes.”
A French physician, M. Martin, who has for several years been an
attaché of the French ambassador at Pekin, calls the Chinese the
authors of the art of gardening. Since the earliest times their leaders
have had the wisdom to have cultivated not only ornamental plants, but
as well those which would increase the resources of the inhabitants.
Their vast enclosures have often been the nurseries of the provinces,
and to excite the ambition of their subjects, the rulers award prizes
on many public occasions to those who present to them new flowers or
fruits. Our societies of horticulture do no better. The annals of the
Tsing dynasty mention mandarins whose business it was to care for the
gardens of the emperor, and especially to look after the bamboos. The
taste for flowers increased by the encouragement of the authorities
gives an astonishing commercial value to certain plants. The _sambac_,
whose flowers have at once the odor of the rose and of the orange, as
blended in the common jasmine, is used to perfume tea, liquors, syrups
and preserves; at Pekin a very small branch is worth from ten dollars
to twelve dollars and upwards. An _asclepias_, which gives its perfume
only at night, has been sold for twenty and thirty ounces of silver,
and each year the viceroy of the province of Tche-kiang sends several
cuttings of it to Pekin for the apartments of the emperor. In order to
profit by so lucrative a taste, Chinese horticulture has been for the
most part spent in trying to make the most of the treasures of their
flora. To this flora we owe the chief of our ornamental flowers—the
Chinese pink, sent in 1702 to the Abbé Bignon, and first described in
1705; the aster, sent out in 1728, and which received from a committee
of amateurs the name of Queen Marguerite; our autumn chrysanthemum,
which for a long time figured on the coat of arms of the emperors;
the dicentra (or “bleeding heart”), whose rosy spurred cups look like
a double shield; the Chinese rose; the Chinese honeysuckle, whose
original name signifies “the gold and silver flower,” in reference to
its various colors; the begonia, green above and provided with purple
veins below; our camellia, which the Chinese call the tea-flower;
finally, a flower which we call the isle of Guernsey, because the
vessel which brought the bulbs of this elegant amaryllis into England
having been shipwrecked in sight of its country, the bulbs, carried by
the waves on to the sandy shores of the isle, took root there and were
kept alive in the pleasant temperature.
The taste of these Orientals is very different from ours. We are
disagreeably affected by the care which they take to diminish the
height of all vegetation. The missionaries assure us that they have
seen cypresses and pines which were not more than two feet in height,
although forty years old, and well proportioned in all their parts.
It is one way of obtaining a great number of types in a narrow space,
which is precious in a country where the gardens are so elegant and the
ownership so divided. It is one of the results of the culture of the
family life, and if a stranger is but little pleased by these stunted
forms he is, at least, able to extract a moral upon the infinite
patience which has produced them. By energy and will they direct as
they wish the most obstinate plants, and in their flower-beds imitate
lakes, rocks, rivers, and even mountains.
But they have as well their landscape gardens: they are around tombs,
and especially the pagodas, those centers of civilization which
are at once places of prayer, store-houses for the harvests of the
simple, and grazing grounds for the preservation of quadrupeds. It
is in these gardens of the extreme East that one sees those avenues
of bamboos, whose knots hollowed out leave niches for idols; then
there are magnificent specimens of the great thuja of the East, whose
sweet-scented imperishable wood is used for making coffins, and reduced
to powder is made into aromatic chopsticks, which are burnt before the
statues of their divinities; the fir-tree, with long cones, a native
of the northeast; the oak, with leaves like the chestnut tree, and
which bears the mistletoe in China; the weeping willow and the funeral
cypress, whose bright leaves stand out against the black background
of the pines; the _Pinus bungeana_, which grows to an enormous size,
and whose trunk becomes so white with age that it might easily pass
for limestone. We can not describe the effect of this grand, severe
vegetation, intermingled with marble statues and columns, surrounding
the lofty conical roofs of the pagodas.
In no country of Europe are the gardeners so skillful in multiplying
and cultivating. They have processes of their own. Our gardeners do not
know how to use half-rotten planks, which they pierce with holes, fill
with earth, and use in the germination of the cutting; when the plant
begins to grow they break away the plank. We are far from practicing
grafting in their bold style; this horticultural operation is performed
among the Chinese in very different ways. They graft successfully the
chrysanthemum on the wormwood, the oak on the chestnut, the grape
on the jujube tree. These feats, which shock the customs of our
horticulturists and even the convictions of our botanists, recall those
which the good Pliny relates, and for which he has been charged with
ignorance and hyperbole.
Their cleverness in gardening has one outlet of which we are ignorant.
We cut our boxwood, and do not save it for the Palm-Sunday festival.
The Chinese cultivate plants for holy purposes. The ponds and other
bodies of water so numerous in a country where rice is the chief food,
gives them opportunity to cultivate in abundance a magnificent water
plant, the lotus of the Indus, the sacred plant of the Hindoos. The
god Buddha is always represented reposing on the lotus flower, whose
root signifies vigor, its great leaves growth, its odor the sovereign
spirit, its brilliancy love. Thus it is customary to offer to the
idols the beautiful flowers of the lotus; besides, its culture offers
a double advantage, its fruitful root and its sweet grains (the beans
of Egypt) being used in Chinese cookery. The fruit of one variety
of the lemon tree is produced from the separated carpels, which are
disjoined at the base of the lemon and developed separately, like the
fingers of a hand. This hand is among the Chinese that of their god;
_Fo-chou-kan_, as it is called, signifies the sweet smelling hand of
Buddha. A writer assures us that the gardeners aid, by bands which are
early fastened on the fruit, in bringing about this paying division;
they are capable of it.
This union of two very different feelings, the greed for gain and
piety, ought not to astonish us much. The simple affection which they
have for plants seems to be a kind of religious sentiment. Each plant
inspires them with a kind of mystic love which affects certain of their
poems. Their literature represents to us a delight in flowers which we
do not easily understand. They are enraptured at the sight of a plant,
and seek by continued observation to understand its development. One
is not surprised at the degree of skill to which such an exalted taste
leads their gardeners.
The emperors have always especially encouraged the production of
vegetables and orchards, as well as general agriculture. “I prefer,”
said the emperor Kang-hi, “to procure a new kind of fruit or of grain
for my subjects rather than to build an hundred porcelain towers.” Two
centuries before him one prince published an herbarium containing the
plants suitable to cultivate in time of famine, after having consulted
with the peasants and farmers.
The Chinese have always displayed the greatest activity in order to
assure themselves of their food at the expense of the vegetable world,
sometimes from plants which are not cultivated, as from seaweeds, from
which they obtain gelatine or a salty condiment, and particularly from
those which they can perfect in their gardens. There are to be found
in their kitchen gardens not only the most of our common vegetables,
as turnips, carrots, radishes, onions, and our salad herbs, but some
peculiar vegetables like the Chinese cabbage whose seeds furnish oil;
the rapeseed, the young shoots of which are used in pickles, like
those of mustard; fruits similar to our melons and cucumbers; enormous
egg-plants, etc. If the garden contains a stream of water, as is
frequent, they cultivate according to the depth of the water either
aquatic grasses, of which they eat the terminal buds, or water plants
like the lotus, or the Chinese cock’s-comb, of which all the parts
furnish a nourishing fecula, or plants of the melon family, like the
watermelon or the peculiar water chestnut, which is at times a scarlet
red, and which they gather in the autumn. The picturesque way in which
they gather these nuts is well described by M. Fauvel. Men, women and
children embark on the canal in tubs, which they push with long bamboos
about the floating islets of the chestnut, and which often capsize, to
everyone’s great amusement.
In some places one observes a singular culture of mushrooms. These
cryptograms are greatly valued in China, and not alone on account of
their nutritive properties. One species which takes root upon coming
into the open air, and which is edible, has so dry a tissue that it
keeps almost as fresh as when one gathers it ripe. Ancient writers took
it for a symbol of immortality.
It is particularly interesting to examine the Chinese orchards,
distinguishing the productions of the north and south. The fruits
of the south are less interesting: dates, cocoanut trees, mangoes,
bananas, bread trees, pineapples, all tropical fruits which are not
exclusively Chinese. The principal fruits of the north are first _the
five fruits_, that is, the peach, apricot, plum, the chestnut and
the jujube. The most important of Chinese fruit trees is the peach,
which most probably is a native of the country. Its winter florescence
has been taken by Chinese romance writers as the symbol of love and
fidelity. Chinese orchards also furnish many other fruits: several
kinds of plums, a fine white pear as round as our bergamot, the berries
of the myrica, which pass very well for our strawberries, and which
are easily mistaken for the arbute berry; but for general use nothing
equals the Chinese figs and oranges.