The practice of arranging and composing flowers in Japan is not counted among the pastimes of amusement; it is a respected occupation, practiced by men and women alike after they have trained in it for several years. It therefore holds among them a special position as one of the fine arts, with its own historical traditions and its standing among the rest of the fine arts. There is hardly a Japanese man or woman of any culture who is ignorant of this art, for cultivated Japanese have never ceased, since the dawn of their civilization, to give great care to its study. And among the courtesies of company on visits is that the master of the house asks his visitor to give his opinion on the arrangement of the flowers, and he may even ask him to move with his own hand a few blossoms from one vase to another as his artistic taste suggests.

The composition of the flowers must be such as to convey to the beholder a picture resembling, as far as possible, their condition while still on the mother plant — not a picture of something lifeless. The Japanese, for example, arrange flowers in their homes in ways that represent the springing of plants from beneath the surface of the earth, by making them

emerge at the surface of the water in the vessel as though growing out of it; for this reason they use plenty of plant leaves and buds along with the blossoms whose petals have opened.

Flower arrangement everywhere in the world has its rules and principles for observing proportion

and harmony among the colors. To confine roses in an unnatural, tightly packed bunch robs them of their splendor and beauty. You must not crowd leaves and branches at the neck of a transparent vase, and you must observe balance in the passage between the heads of the flowers and the lower ends of

their stems in the vase. The general principle is to secure balance without regard for symmetry, for nature is rarely symmetrical. The main stems of the flowers in the vase must not cross; and to set them parallel and at one height, or at different heights such that each is taller than the next by a fixed ratio, or to place their branches at a single height — all of this is counted devoid of taste. The rule generally followed is that the height should be one and a half times the height of the vessel if the vessel is tall; if it is short, then the height of the flowers must be one and a half times as much.

One color must be the principal color in any arrangement, instead of the colors being equal; and gathering the flowers of a single color together in a bunch may well be more beautiful than scattering them here and there through the bunch, for scattered colors do not invite the gaze — the eye recoils from them — and so they are said to be unbalanced. The dark colors