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.