Flowers, shrubs, and dwarf trees in pots and tubs are commonly used in the vicinity of the verandah, and also about the garden for decorative features; and here tasteful and rustic effects are sought for in the design and material of the larger wooden receptacles.  Figure 1 represents a shallow trough made from a fragment of an old shipwreck, blackened by age, and mounted on a dark woodstand.  In this trough are two stones, a bronze crab, and a few aquatic plants.

      Another wooden flower pot of large size (Fig. 2) is made from the planks of an old vessel, the wood perforated by Teredo [shipworm] , and the grain deeply worn out by age.  Its form permits it to be carried by two men.
      Among the most extraordinary objects connected with gardens are the dwarf plum trees.  Before the evidence of life appears in the blooming, one would certainly believe that a collection of dwarf plum trees were simply fragments of old blackened and distorted branches or roots, -- as if fragments of dead wood had been selected for the purpose of grotesque display!  Indeed, nothing more hopeless for flowers or life could be imagined than the appearance of these irregular, flattened, and even perforated sticks and stumps.  They are kept in [sic] the house on the sunny side, and while the snow is yet on the ground, send out long, delicate drooping twigs, which are soon strung with a wealth of the most beautiful rosy-tinted blossoms it is possible to conceive; and, curiously enough, not a trace of a green leaf appears during all this luxuriant blossoming.
      Figure 3 is an attempt to show the appearance of one of these phenomenal plum trees.  It was over forty years old, and stood about 3 feet high.  By what horticultural sorcery life had been kept in this blackened stump, only a Japanese gardener knows.  And such a vitality!  Not a few feeble twigs and blossoms as an expiring effort, but a delicious growth of the most vigorous and dainty flowers.  The pines are equally remarkable in their way.  It is very curious to see a sturdy old pine tree, masculine and gruff in its gnarled branches and tortuous trunk, perhaps forty or fifty years old, and yet not over 2 feet in height, and growing in a flower pot; or a think chunk of pine standing upright in a flower pot, and sending out vigorous branches covered with leaves (Fig. 4), and others trained in ways that seem incredible.

      In a large garden in Tokyo I saw one of these trees that spread out in a symmetrical convex disk with a diameter of twenty feet or more, yet standing not over 2 feet in height (Fig. 5); still another one, in which the branches had been trained to assume the appearance of flattened disks -- (Fig.6). 2

1    The National Union Catalog, Vol. 396, pp. 318-323.  Date of death corrected from 1935 to 1925 in personal e-mail to RJB from Dr. Andrew L. Maske, Curator of Japanese Art, Peabody Essex Museum, 09/24/2004.  Photo from http://www.inhs.uiuc.edu/%7Eksc/Malacologists/MorseE.S.html.

2    Morse in Bonsai, BCI, Vol. XVII, No. 10, December 1978, pp. 340-341, with these six b&w illustrations.  "Reprinted by permission of Dover Publications, Inc. New York.  This article was submitted to the Editors of Bonsai courtesy of Mrs. Harold L. Krivoy, Northern Virginia Bonsai Society."

     A digitalized version of the 1886 edition is here.