GARDENS of the Middle Flowery Kingdom are of less importance than its gardening. China is a vast garden, and so appears to the eye, the landscape containing no meadows or pastures or fences or hedgerows. The plots of land are treeless, but broken by raised pathways in which many trees are seen growing, and scattered here and there are pleasant villages of whitewashed houses, prettily embowered. Nevertheless, one who knew the country well wrote of it: "Elegance or ornament, orderly arrangement and grandeur of design, cleanliness and comfort, as these terms are applied in Europe, are almost unknown in Chinese houses, cities or gardens".

There are, indeed, gardens like that owned by a country gentleman of Ningoo, into which one passes from the dwelling rooms of the residence through apparently subterranean passages, revealing here and there courts planted with dwarf trees, and graceful creepers overhanging little pools - gardens of dwarf trees, vases, ornamented lattices and beautiful shrubs, mingled with winding, rocky passages, in such fashion as to deceive the judgment regarding the extent of the grounds. But even in these the rapid decay of the unsubstantial mason and wood work, unless constantly repaired, soon results in a ruinous appearance. It is strange that in that country where government, customs and the organization of society are most enduring, villages and cities should be so insignificant, buildings so unsubstantial, and the appearance of everything have a temporary and partially decayed air. For in China it is the method that endures. Its gardening, like its civilization, is less the result of individual enterprise than of a vast accumulation of experience obtained by five thousand fairly peaceful, toilsome years of social and national existence.

The tools used in cultivating the ground are primitive, the implements of ages past, perhaps ruder than the ploughs and hoes of earliest England ; but the methods of cultivation are, in some regards, in advance of even our own. Perhaps one-fourth of the entire cultivated land is made to produce two crops in the year, a portion of it three crops ; and fallows appear to have been almost if not entirely banished by the careful economy which makes use of all known manures, using even the burnt firecrackers of the feast of lanterns to fertilize the fields, not to speak of less pleasant forms of waste nitrogenous compounds.

Williams, in his excellent "Middle Kingdom," estimates that the cultivated land per inhabitant is, in France, 1½ acres; in Holland and in China, 1 4/5 acres. which the duplication of crops in the latter country maybe said to increase to 2] acres.

Such facts are highly important to a comprehension of the merits and the defects of Chinese gardening, and by their light we are able at once to appreciate what these busy millions of gardeners have accomplished, and also to see wherein they have failed of success in their long ages of industrious toil.

The country is a vast vegetable garden, and almost every variety of edible vegetable production is in use on Chinese tables. Rice is the staple, and two crops are commonly gathered, after which, in some provinces and near the cities where land is valuable, a winter crop of sweet potatoes, cabbages or turnips is raised upon the rice plots. Apparently the aim of the gardener has been to keep the ground in constant use rather than to obtain a large crop or improved varieties ; for we are told that the Chinese vegetables are usually inferior in size and flavor to those found in our markets. The sweet potato is the common tuber, and the many sorts of beans hold pre-eminence among the important vegetables, notwithstanding the almost universal use of garlics, onions, leeks, etc. Every growing edible is used for greens: pigweed, purslane, clover, ailanthus, as well as lettuce, spinach, celery, ginger and mustard ; even green ginger is used as a vegetable. The variety of cucurbitaceous plants extends to twenty, and aquatic roots, nelumbium, etc., still further enlarge the list of vegetable dishes.

In the Chinese Herbal, kitchen herbs consist of five families, containing 133 species, some parts of each of which are eaten.

Without attempting in this short paper to enter upon more than the outlines of a subject of so many details. we may turn at once to certain practical lessons to be drawn from China's vast experience in gardening and in the use of garden products.

1st. We are told that the Chinese agriculturist manures the plant rather than the soil. He obtains his fertilizers by making economy of fertilizing compounds a first principle, to the disregard of many other important considerations. Canon Gray tells us that some of the prettiest women he saw in China, each with a flower in her hair, were those engaged in the removal of night soil from the streets. If such a result is desirable, then Chinese civilization is as superior as that conceited people claim it to be.

2d. Chinese success in gardening has given the country its vast multitudes, but has deprived them of cattle, milk and bread. There is said not to be an acre of land sown to grass in all China. If we desire a vast population composed of peaceful, conservative people, industrious, but without that energy of mind and character which has always distinguished our race, we have only to adopt China's mild vegetarianism, and develop the garden and the orchard rather than the field and pasture. At the bottom of national character lies, as a physical basis, the diet - not simply the diet of the people, but of its generation.

3rd. The best results obtained from the garden, as contrasted with the field, are not the economical ones - the production of more mouths to feed nor of more hands to labor - but its aesthetic ones : the love for and enjoyment of flowers and all natural objects, and the simple delight in the every-day hues of the beauties of the growing world.

Those who doubt the existence of such sentiments among the millions of Asia should read the Chinese ballad of the Tea Picker, which is sung by the young girls and women who pick the tea in the tea gardens on the hills of China. There is much in Eastern art, and something in its literature, to indicate that even as regards the swarming myriads of China, the poetic influence of gardening has been the purely successful one - producing a good result without alloy.

4th. Regarded in its economical aspects Chinese gardening may be called the successful failure of vegetarianism. The result has been accomplished, the feeding a vast population on vegetable food; for while quantities of fish and other meats are used in China, the diet is sufficiently vegetarian in character to make the country an example of what that cult would persuade us to accept. The aim of agriculture is not to produce the greatest amount of food, but the best food that can be produced. The aim of gardening is not to make life possible on an acre of ground, but give the energetic mind and body what it needs to supplement the other foods and employments and recreations of an active life. It is not so much on economical grounds that we are to urge for every laboring man, however poor, the possession of a little plot of land ; rather are the reasons those which have to do with the spiritual existence of the family, especially the children. We do not need to make it easier for the poor and miserable to breed poverty and misery for another generation, but it should be our effort to make the home and family life of every household the best possible, and especially to bring to it the good influences of the garden and of the natural world, to the love of which gardening leads.

A study of Chinese gardening does not indicate that we have made a mistake in our apparently wasteful method of using the earth, but the fine taste in artistic forms and colors, the simple and widespread enjoyment of the natural world, which more extended knowledge of Eastern nations shows us to be the posession of even the common people, have a most important lesson. We have failed to get into our very blood that love for nature and nature's forms and coloring that has somehow become an inheritance with these eastern millions. We exaggerate and are sentimental where they enjoy so simply and quietly that we are hardly willing to credit them with any feeling whatever. But however little intensity there may be in the feeling of the Chinese and Japanese for nature, their arts give the plainest evidence that we have much to learn from them.

That love of flowers which causes the boat-women and even women scavengers to wear them in their tresses*, and the tea-pickers to sing at their work •'My wicker basket slung on arm, and hair entwined with flowers, To the slopes I go of high Sunglo, and pick the tea for hours -" this simple enjoyment of natural beauty may have done more for the world than we have supposed, and it may be precisely the influence that our own population needs. The preaching of the pulpit, the service of the church, the work of the school, are all easy to estimate, but those quiet, uplifting influences that flow into the responsive heart from the natural world, who can tell their transformations ? Even amid dark superstitions, the millions of China have at least the gentle light of the silent world of nature, which gardening has taught them to love.