Directory_and_Chronicle_1841 — Page 299

1841.

Notices of Japan, No. IX.

285

remain till they are withered; they are then rolled by hand, and dried in the iron roasting-pan. When thus prepared, less of the yellow juice exuding, the leaves retain a brighter green color, and more of their narcotic quality. Hence Dr. Von Siebold conjectures that all black and green teas differ solely from the mode of drying the leaves, but without the use of copper. Yet it must be remembered that Linnæus held them to be of two distinct plants; and that in the best European botanical gardens-e. g. at this moment at Leyden, where Dr. Siebold resides- two distinct plants, with somewhat differently shaped leaves, are shown as the black and the green tea plants. When fresh dried, the tea is delicately susceptible of odors, and requires to the carefully guarded from their influence.

Ere quitting this subject, a few words must be said of Japanese gardeners, although, their horticultural skill should rather entitle them to rank amongst the artists or artificers than the agriculturists. These gardeners value themselves alike upon the art of dwarfing, and also of unnaturally enlarging, all natural productions. They exhibit, in the miniature gardens of the towns, full-grown trees of various kinds, three feet high, with heads three feet in diameter. These dwarf-trees are reared in flower-pots, as alluded to in one of the poems before quoted; and when they bear luxuriant branches upon a distorted stem, the very acmé of perfection is attained; or, to speak more correctly, it might be supposed attained, had not president Meylan, in the year 1826, seen a box, which he describes as one inch in diameter by three inches high, but which Fischer repre- sents, somewhat less incredibly, as four inches long, one and a half wide, and six high, in which were actually growing and thriving a bamboo, a fir, and a plum- tree, the latter in full blossom. The price of this portable grove was 1,200 Dutch gulden, or about £100.

As examples of the success of these horticulturists in the opposite branch of their art, Meylan describes plum-trees covered with blossoms, each blossom four times the size of the cabbage-rose-of course, not producing fruit, which the Japanese appear not greatly to value-and of radishes weighing from fifty to sixty pounds; radishes of fifteen pounds weight he speaks of as of common occurrence, This gigantifying art, to coin a word, is more beneficially applied to fir-trees : many of these growing in the grounds of temples are represented as extraordinari. ly large. No dimensions of trunks are stated, but we are told that the branches springing at the height of seven or eight feet are led out, sometimes across ponds and supported upon props, to such a length, that they give a shade of three hund- red feet in diameter. Thunberg also mentions a pine he saw near Odowara near Yede, the branches of which were twenty paces long, and supported on poles, the whole forming a vegetating covering over a summer-house.*

* [To the person acquainted with Chinese arts and agriculture, many of the operations described in this article will be seen to bear a very close resemblance to those practiced in the former kingdom. The cultivation of rice and tea is con- ducted on the same plan; the taste for vegetable monstrosities, as dwarfed trees, crooked and fantastic shaped bamboos, &c., is peculiar to both; many of the processes employed in agriculture, as will as in other occupations, are the same in both countries; and lastly, many of the features of the social system are apparently identical.] -