| "Gardening at the World's Fair"
by M.C. Robbins (1893) includes these lines:
In front of the buildings, on the
east side of the path
which leads through the grounds, is an arrangement of mounds and tiny
steps, with groupings of flat stones here and there, which reminds one
of pictures of the gardens of Japan. Umbrella-pines are here
planted with other trees and
shrubs of that country, and tiny winding paths lead down to the edge of
the water, which gleams through the shrubbery upon the slopes.
There are none of those attempts at minute gardening, of which
specimens are shown in the Horticultural Building, with queer little
old distorted trees,
and miniature bridges and lamps and imitation tea-houses…
The picturesque dwarf trees of Japan interested me greatly.
One poor old Cypress,
three hundred years old, perished with the winter, but there were some
ancient crooked Maples, about a foot high, and a Pine tree with
gnarled branches and massive roots that would have adorned a forest in
Lilliput, for they must have been at least eighteen inches tall.
Every leaf had been carefully trained on the Maple, and the
pine-needles were held imperceptibly in place to produce that fine
cushiony effect that is so highly prized. It seemed like looking
at some venerable monarch of the forest through the reverse end of an
opera-glass, so perfectly did the Lilliputian tree reproduce all the
storm-wrought eccentricities of the great one. 1
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