CHAPTER XVIII
THE FOUR SEASONS OF FLOWERS
I. SPRING
“Spring, spring has come, while yet the landscape bears
Its fleecy burden of unmelted snow!
Now may the zephyrs gently ’gin to blow,
To melt the nightingale’s sweet frozen tears.
Too lightly woven must the garments be—
Garments of mist that clothe the coming spring,—
In wild disorder, see them fluttering,
Soon as the zephyr breathes adown the lea!”
Basil Hall Chamberlain
Out of the ugliness of pain beauty may spring,—the child from the travail and suffering of his mother; the picture from that of the artist; the poem, the great book from the hardly-caught, anguish-snatched inspiration, wrought in labour, of its author,—and out of the storm and frost, and the painful melting of winter, spring.
With each birth there must also be love, the courage, the persistency of love, which faces the torture of production, that the child of the heart, of the imagination, may be born into the world. Without love there is no miracle, without suffering there can be no splendour of beauty. The artist who creates as a hen lays an egg attracts us no more to his work than the hen by her frenzied cackling does to hers. And as without love all is naught, so, without the ardours and anguishes of the soul, is all useless. The spring that is not wrenched painfully from the lap of winter, the spring that follows languidly and tamely after the heat and greenness of a tropic season, has lost much that makes it dear. What we gain in ease of attainment is forfeited in delight—the high, sharp edge that is suffering and joy in one.
In Japan the suffering almost overbears the joy. The spring comes and is gone again, the bitter cold is back, the biting wind, the sullen ache of the chill air. The swelling buds are pinched, the frost grips them and bids them wait; and even when, a little kinder, he bids them open, the winter, jealous of the white flowers of the Plum, may send an envious snow-storm to rival the fallen petals.
As early as January the Plum blossoms begin to appear. First the fragile, frightened-looking white ones; then the healthier, less wraith-like, creamy ones; and last of all those of pearly pink, pure pink, and even hardy crimson. Of course these are out of doors; already, from New Year’s Day onward, there have been the forced blooms in jars for the place of honour on the takenomo, where the ‘Three Friends of Winter’—the Plum, the Bamboo, and the Pine—appear together.
The Plum-blossom Viewing is, with the Japanese people, almost a sacrament. To it is brought none of the rather boisterous joy and merriment of the Cherry-blossom Feast. Nor is it wholly because of the cold, which to them is as nothing when under the spell, the emotion, of the hour. Huddled up in their wadded kimonos, drinking hot tea and saké at the pretty little booths always erected for the purpose near the groves of trees, or rubbing numb and aching hands over the glowing coals of a hibachi, they care nothing for the temperature; for the awe of earth’s awakening, the wonder and amazement of the yearly miracle, is upon them. Even the children are touched by the sense of mystery, it would seem, and their usual strenuous gaiety is subdued. They look at their little brother the Spring in hushed astonishment.
The father whose newborn child is placed in his arms regards it with pride, with tenderness, with yearning, and with some possible dislike, but with wonder always. This is his child, his own, who has drawn down into the shadow of death the woman he loves, and for whom the woman he loves made the sacrifice gladly and thankfully.
“Trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our Home.”
Spring is everywhere a well-loved time, as a thousand poets have testified. Even in Hong-Kong, where it comes as boldly and as flauntingly, in autumn clothing, as an Eastern queen; even in Singapore and Manila, where it drags itself in tiredly after heat; even in the grimiest Northern town, smoke-obscured and foul, the young, timid grass that peers up from the rough edges of pavements, the small, misshapen trees, hopefully green, bring the message of youth and gladness. But in Japan it is the most rapturous, enchanting time, ethereally, earthily beautiful; of soft, misty, tender-coloured skies; of sudden tears and of as sudden sunlight; laughing, coaxing, teasing, elusive—joyously and exuberantly young.
In February the Plum blooms on, and the Camellias—small double pink ones, big single red ones, pure waxy white ones, and those which, they say, resemble a decapitated head when they fall off—appear in crowds. Indeed, the Camellia goes on pretty well throughout the cold season—from November to March—and might almost be called, like the Chrysanthemum, ‘The flower of the Four Seasons.’
Early March sees the Plum blossom ended, and the Peach blossom arrive—the flower dedicated to girls. The hills that have had the real snow on the ground, and the flower-snow in the air and on the trees, have lost the white to gain the green. The world is broad awake now, and birds are twittering. Daphnes, pink and white, have come, and pink Forsythias, and the fluffy golden balls of Edgeworthia papirifera, from which Japanese tough-fibred paper is made, and a multitude of little plants the spring brings to other lands. The Peach boughs flaunt their fiery signals, and the Cherry blossoms are beginning to cloud the sheltered groves of silver-grey trees, as if rosy mists lay low upon them. One may follow the Cherry blossoms, as I used to do strawberries when I was a child, from South to North, and get them at their best for many weeks, from Nagasaki to Chuzenji, or, longer yet, to Hakodate.
April sees the new shafts of Bamboo come up, like fairy telescopes to look at the stars of Sakura, the Cherry. The Columbine’s elfin bugles, loved wild flower of my youth, appears, and Cypripedium, wild Lily of the Valley, and Violets galore. And before the Sakura has vanished, towards the last weeks of April, the tree Pæony has begun. Like the Cherry it flowers in many shades of pink, and even in crimson. Simultaneously, and later too, appear the forced kind of splendid curves and colours grown in flower-pots.
Then comes the floral month of May, when no artist can paint fast enough—so Mr. Tyndale says—to hope to show on his canvas one-half of the flowers which Nature so prodigally lavishes on the year.
Cherry blossoms are scarce fading before Azaleas are ready to carry on the rich harmonies of colour; and as a passionate love motif begins to weave itself into the end of a symphony’s movement before we get it presented in all its full splendour of great crashing notes and full-gathered chords in its final evolution, so the Azaleas begin suavely in shadowy mauve blooms before the gorgeous climax of their scarlet, orange, crimson, and snow-white blossoms bursts forth. Like love, again, the Azaleas linger long, painting the hill-sides from early in May, at Kyoto, well into August at Nikko and Chuzenji. Oh! the fire of the red ones, and the fragrance of the white ones, and the beauty of them all! Barbarian that I am, I like these flowers best, but the subtle-minded Japanese prefers the Wistaria, which comes as early but does not last so long.
But is anything lovelier? As I look back on the bowers of pale purple blooms that I have known, I hesitate. When I think of an old gate, decked as if for a bridal arch, with delicately fashioned, pure white blossoms, I hesitate still more. And the exquisite bean-blossom fragrance of them!
Never was a falser statement made than that the flowers of Japan have no fragrance. All the species that have perfume in other countries are even sweeter here. Wistaria, Azalea, all the many Lilies are rich in delicious scent, while Plum and Cherry, wild Apple and Peach have something more than the sweet pungent odour they offer in other lands. Magnolias, in Kyoto, have the mystic fragrance, half religious, half sensual, that they have in Virginia. Woods, banks, and hill-sides in Japan are often as heavily sweet as Easter churches at home.
Of the last named, April’s flower and May’s, Sir Francis Piggott has a pretty simile: “Magnolia trees, leafless as yet, with blossoms standing up like great candles which seem to make the daylight linger and live longer in the night.”
In May, or April in the South, in Wistaria-time, comes also the Pæony, the small sort, cultivated in pots. This is one of the various China-New-Year flowers in Hong-Kong, but it was too flauntingly Chinese to appeal to me very much (although its pink and white and deep red blooms are as splendid as befits the ‘Rich Man’s Flower’), until Mr. Tyndale’s poetic presentation of it (see page 234) put it in its transformed light as a Japanese flower.
Irises one sees in May, and well into June. At Hakone I know peasants’ gardens where they may be found in late July, and even in August. Adorably, fragilely perfect things, are not they best of all? I remember a faultless group of them on the banks of an ugly little stream on the road to Kurihama, Perry’s landing-place. They were fluttering, like true flags, in a wind which was sharp enough to tear into rags the silk gossamer texture of their petals, but which left them uninjured. They were planted and tended by peasants, but no millionaire, with a staff of highly paid gardeners, could have had more exquisite specimens. There were pale blue ones, delicate as a misty April sky; and rosy mauve ones, like a flushing Western one; there were Quaker-garbed blooms, silvery grey and white ones, thin and crinkled like almost transparent silk. These plants must have been lovingly as well as judiciously looked after, for Irises of such perfection are most difficult things to grow. With infinite affection, but, alas! without scientific knowledge, I have never been able to persuade those I have had from Japan to do anything, and even scientific growers, who have not perhaps the necessary love for them, have been disappointed in the same way. They are nowhere else so beautiful as in Japan. Near Yokohama, in a shallow valley, there is a vast field of them. The picture facing page 194, although not painted there, but nearer Kyoto, gives an idea of them. A tiny silver ribbon of a stream slips zigzag down among them, and doubles the beauty of those near enough to be reflected in it; fluttering their silken flags, with leaves like swords high in air, they fill the place like a fairy army. Irises usher in the summer.
II. SUMMER
“Like strips of cloth laid down to bleach,
Snow-white in moonlight lie
The Deutzia bushes by the path
For summer’s finery.”
So says the poet, and his acclaimed flower is the great white mark of June in the mountains—the broad white stripe that distinguishes the first-class compartment.
Spring is the favoured first-born of the year, and has the most wealth of bloom, as his entail from the Father Year. But summer, well-beloved second son, has a rich inheritance also, from his mother Nature. Even those fragrant blossoms rightfully accruing to spring. Azaleas and Irises, in the Northern parts and in the mountain altitudes creep into summer’s lap. Here, in my garden in Hong-Kong, bewildered by the heat coming before the rains, as it has done this year, my Japanese Azaleas, snow-white, amber, orange, and carmine, are adorning September with flowers; yet no bait of double daily waterings could lure them out in the fierce unusual heat of spring.
June should be as full of Irises as of rain. Honeysuckle, coral and white, lap over from May; and Spiræa in varying shades, from untinged white to nearly a crimson—so deep is the pink froth of flower, and so red the intricate pattern of branch and stem—are seen all the summer, and even into the early autumn. I sprained a shoulder gathering it, and nearly broke my neck besides, climbing up a slippery, friable, red hill-side after it at Ashinoyu. Under any name I love it—its proper botanical nomenclature, its stately lady-name ‘Veronica’; or as the homely ‘Meadow Sweet’ I called it as a child. Another home flower decks this full time of the year—Clematis. There is a big-bloomed purple kind, much like our New England south-porch favourite, which is called Clematis florida; and another, the wild sort, except for a difference in the shape of the leaves is almost exactly the same as that which clambers so gracefully over stone walls and grey fences, whose starry white blooms mingle so happily with the deep red berries of the Choke-cherry in Massachusetts. Its fluffy seed-vessels, which give it the ugly name of ‘Old Man’s Beard,’ have rather longer filaments than at home, however.
The Bignonia blazes brightest at mid-summer, the epitome of the summer’s sunshine, so yellow that it is orange, like sunset on fairy horns of brass. Mr. Tyndale’s picture facing page 92 shows a tea-house roof, gay with Bignonia grandiflora, a luxuriance of waving vine that recalled the ruins of the Residency at Lucknow to me—for Japan’s sun in July is like India’s in January. But his picture was painted at the end of June in Kyoto, as the season there is three weeks earlier than in the part I know best near Yokohama.
In June, and until late in the autumn, the wild Hydrangeas bloom in every hedgerow. Besides the bright blue which every one knows, and which is so much grown in pots with us, there is another (H. hortensia, va japonica), which is greenish-white in the centre, with purple flowers like a halo around the edge. Another (H. virens) has hard, round blue balls in the centre, with florets at the edges of pale blue fading to white, and even into a kind of rusty pink. It is rather coarse, but most effective, and in bud both are very striking looking, for the whole flower-head appears like a round green ‘snowball.’ The prettiest ones of all are the graceful, slender-stemmed, white Hydrangeas, which we were never tired of gathering, although, in spite of slitting the stems, they drooped so soon in water. These were often varied by pink florets, and in under the great Cryptomeria trees, on the paths near Miyanoshita, I have found them of a deep carmine.
The lovely Deutzia bells have ceased ringing as the Hydrangeas begin to appear, but long before the latter are finished the various Lilies—big temple bells—have come to take the place of the Deutzia’s fairy chimes. I never got used to those wonderful Lilies of Japan. My heart simply stopped beating the first time I saw, on a wild, rough hill-side above the sea, the splendid, stately blooms, standing up like royalty over the humbler flowers in the grass. No, surely Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these! And that these kings of the plant world should appear thus in all their rich state garments, crowned and sceptred, without a Court to set off their glory! … I saw whole fields of our Easter or Madonna Lilies (L. longiflorum), pure and white, bathed in the sunshine of an August day; I saw hill-sides, rugged and coarse with Bamboo grass, glorified with gold-patterned Lilium auratum; rocky cliffs above the bay at Dzushi, where they climbed fearlessly, but I dared not follow; I saw the crimson-spotted Lilium speciosum rubrurum, atilt in a scrambly waste, unconscious of the price their blooms would fetch in New York or London; the orange Day Lily (Hemerocallis fulva), on peasants’ roof-trees; L. Krameri, pink and flawless as a Court beauty, cuddled like a gipsy under a Bamboo hedge; Tiger Lilies, burning in a jungle, as if they were the beast, not the blossom; and blood-red L. elegans, like a great ruby dropped from a crown, glowing serenely in the ditch that drained a paddy-field. It was always a miracle. Like every new baby, each one was an individual, a solemn and beautiful gift, straight from God.
That the Japanese themselves do not value and admire Lilies is another of the fallacies so often repeated, which no one has ever taken the trouble to dispute. One of the first writers on the flora of Japan made the rash statement that her flowers had no perfume, her birds did not sing, and—but I will not repeat the third. I have heard it quoted and requoted ad nauseam, and on one occasion by a friend who was walking beside me as I carried homeward through the woods, lyric with birds’ voices, a sheaf of Lilies almost overpoweringly sweet. So the tale goes on that, because the Japanese love so deeply the subtle, poet-sung blossoms of Plum, Wistaria, Cherry, and Iris, they disdain those more obvious beauties of their fields and hill-sides; that they eat the roots of their Lilium auratum; ergo, they cannot love or admire them. Yes, and also do they eat the roots of the sacred Lotus and the young shoots of Bamboo, and yet no one suggests that these are not regarded and honoured. I have seen peasants by the tens, and small boys by the dozens, carrying home those same Lilies carefully, to decorate their homes. And furthermore, I have seen them exalted in the sacred niche, the honourable altar of the house, in many, many humble homes. A fine old Japanese gentleman at the Yokohama Nursery told me that the Auratum Lily is cultivated for its flowers as well as for its edible bulb; but it is only the bulb more or less worn out by age that is eaten, when it is past its prime, and its flowers are not such as it produced in earlier years. Also it provides a bigger dish, with just as good a flavour as that of the smaller ones. Like the darkie saying about Hyacinth bells, the Japanese believe that for each year there is a new flower on the old stalk.
August is the month of Lotus flowers, as Japan is the land of them. At dawn, on dreaming moat and lake, their réveillé salute of opening buds is sounded. Hardly longer than the much loved Convolvulus blooms do they last, for a day sees the height of their perfection of shape and line, and then the petals fall, to show, like the other favourite, a seed-pod of a design as richly decorative, as gracefully shaped, as the flower. For both these poetry-inspired plants will the Japanese (and even some foreigners) get up an hour before day—when the day comes very early—to catch, at the hallowed moment of transformation, the opening blossoms. Kofu is famous for its Lotuses—the great Castle moat is starred white with them, as in the picture
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ROCK GARDEN AT NIKKO
COSMOS AND MAPLE
facing page 116, while in the Public Gardens there are lovely pink- and carmine-tipped ones, as shown facing page 212.
At this time of year, too, the flora of Fujiyama is more than beautiful, and most prodigal. Here we find all sorts of Alpine flowers, prominent among which is the lovely Actæa spicata with its raceme of white flowers, as well as a host of Anemones.
III. AUTUMN
“Faded the clover now, sere and withered the grasses;
What dreams the matsumushi in the desolate autumn fields?
Strangely sad, I thought, sounded the bell of evening;
Haply that tone proclaimed the night in which autumn dies!
Viewing the autumn moon, I dream of my native village.
Under the same soft light,—and the shadows about my home.”
On invisible feet slips the stately autumn into summer’s place. Something has come to the air, a hint of change, some glory which cannot be defined into the sky and the leaves. Perhaps it has rained, and the languid, burning heat of the day before has now a sparkle in it; as hot, it may be, but alive, vivid. Perhaps it comes with a chill wind at evening, when faithful little Matsu, sent with coats and a lantern from the hotel to find us, is very welcome. Or it may be that at dawn one feels too cold to get up and look at a mother-o’-pearl Fuji, rising from and repeated in the lake, but draws over one the heavy wadded futon instead.
The flowers are at first the same. Lilies linger, the sharp little red tongues of Nerine are not yet stuck out mockingly from the brown earth. They await the time of the equinox, when, like goblin fires, they may burst wickedly from the dark soil. Campanulas, which all through August have rung their bells as constantly as church chimes I wot of in Cuba, peal on in fairy joy into September, and even October. Spiræa is never done fringing the roadsides, it would seem, and Hydrangeas go on heroically, with almost a Spartan stoicism. And there are still Orchids, a dainty little pink one (Spiranthes australis), which sets its tiny flowers in a spiral around its stalks, wreathed like a maypole. Crape Myrtle, or the Monkey Box shrub (Lagerstrœmia indica) still blooms, white and a deep old rose, on its trim little trees;[1] while Bignonia, with orange trumpets, which is the true flower of August, bugles long into September. Even Spider Wort, whose blue is so easily extracted that it is used for dyeing, and to symbolize fickle love, is constant in the mountains to the season, and has to be driven away by autumn’s chilliest looks.
But with that coquette’s cold glances the leaves blaze into fire—a consuming passion of love. The Sumach and its kin, the various sorts of Lacquer trees, are aflame first; but beware of breaking their glowing branches to carry home to warm your takenomo, for the juice may poison you, and bring out a horrid red rash. Then creepers, one after another, are lighted up like strings of lanterns at an evening fête. The Virginia Creeper is the best, and wreathes the Cryptomeria trunk with scarlet and deep crimson. The Japanese think that this plant steals the blood from the sacred tree, so near the ground the stem is cut, and the vine above is left to die out in ineffectual fire.
On sweeps September. The hills are pinky silver with that loveliest of grasses Eulalia japonica. Hazel bushes and Birches have taken on a luminous pale gold, and Asters, by the path, spell Autumn in their starry blooms. Dozens of other Compositæ have appeared, Michaelmas Daisies, Arnica, pale blue Scabious, wild Geranium, and tiny straggling wild Pinks, Toad Flax, Lespedeza or Indigo dressed in mauve and rose colour, and a Gentian, not much unlike that which was the prize of September in my American childhood’s day. Monkshood or Aconite, regally, superbly blue, is everywhere; the mere naming of it is a delight, recalling the happy hours spent in gathering its blossoms or sketching among them in the richest flower land I have ever known.[2] Glorious Campions, fiery red, there may be, too, before the Maples, with the frost, turn the world into a pageant of colour, and make even gay things dull by contrast. The streams run red as blood with their fallen leaves. The land is dressed in its rich brocade of autumn.
The Autumn comes from the West, the Japanese say, and on Western-sloping hills there are the Maples set to catch the very last gleam. All the poets have a word to tell us about it, for next to Spring it is their favourite theme. One says—
“Like far-off smoke upon the hill-side lies
The purple haze of Autumn, pale and chill:
Is it the blazing Maples, whose flame dies,
And trailing off in smoke would linger still?”
November has brought the Chrysanthemum, and its fête day, of Emperor and common people, but the true Autumn flowers “are the Maple leaves, little fiery hands of babies, loved and cherished by a nation, themselves still delightfully, divinely, children.”
IV. WINTER
“Flowers blossom and then fall. The flower-like snow
Falls first and blossoms later.”—Baron Takasaki
The year is not dead and shrouded with the coming of the Winter and the snow. Late into November the Maple’s glory lasts, like a fiery sunset, burning itself slowly out. Bass and Birch trees, turned warm, sunny yellow, eke out the meagre noon sunlight, too, with their ochre and saffron leaves. Oaks, heavily clad in russet, velvety brown, or sienna garments, keep their warmth of colouring past December, while the Cryptomeria trees change to such a rich bronze that the other dark which evergreens give the landscape is nullified. The ‘Iron Creeper’ (Kadsura japonica), which has stems as thick and nearly as strong as steel-wire hawsers, clings to its brownish red foliage as long as possible. And there is plenty of green left—Laurels, of all sorts, glossy and well-groomed looking; Fir trees and Junipers, Mosses and Ivy, and the constant Bamboo. There is real colour, too, in the winter berries: Nandina domestica, known (along with several other plants) as the ‘Holly of the Orient,’ has brilliant red fruit, like the true home sort, but with leaves not prickly and intractable, though glossy and decorative. Another variety has orange balls, and is handsome, though not so appealing. There is Mistletoe, too (so kissing is not unknown in Japan—among foreigners, at least); but it must be picked young, as the berries, which are at first waxy white like ours, change later to yellow, and finally to a reddish orange. There are many other winter berries, deep red, black, dark purple, pale greeny white; and the brown seed-pods of various plants are interesting and beautiful in design and harmony of tone.
All these things, far into the winter, provide food for the birds, glowing flecks of colour to the shrubberies, and variety and a sense of cheer to the bleak outlook. But I should not use the word ‘bleak,’ or suggest that to me, any more than to the Japanese, does the country look dreary or forlorn at this season. The air is sharp and keen, not damp and raw, as it may be later on—that is, earlier in the new year. The exquisite tracery of twigs—like the tiny musical notes that go to make up one of the great harmonies of Nature—are seen then at their best. The purply gloom beneath the trees is as satisfying as the green of summer; the buds, rounded and reddening, give the world a tender charm, even at its harshest moment of cold. Then there is time to look at the mellow tints of cryptic markings on tree-trunks; at the delicate silver lichens encrusting them, like the exquisite filigree work of Mexico; to learn to find the pregnant beauty of common
SINGLE CAMELLIAS AT UENO PARK
TOKIO
everyday things, which we are so used to that we forget to admire—as, when guests are gone, we may look again at the home faces that are dear to us.
With the snow there is no sense of the shroud—rather the Western notion of bridal finery. The poets love it; the Court writes verses on it; the boys delight in it; the common people, pinched with cold in paper-and-wood houses, leave their charcoal hibachi to go out to admire it.
“ ’Tis the first snow,
Just enough to bend
The Gladiolus leaves.[3]
’Tis the first snow,
Yet some one is indoors:
Who can it be?”
The garden now is transformed, glorified; each rounded hill is sheeted, the loved shape beneath softly covered, but discernible, as of a woman sleeping. The stone lantern, shaped for such a time low and flat, crouches like a gnome with a magic umbrella, or like a great white mushroom in a garden of ghosts. The little bamboo summer-house is made of marble now, and the well-cover and gateway too are of fairy marble, unstained by time and storm. The Plum tree blooms, even before its early season. Each twig and branch is weighed down as with flowers, as the Japanese say—the Flowers of the Snow.
To one who loves them it is hard to say when they are best, these Japanese gardens: pearly with spring, green and cool in the heat of summer, ardent and flaming with the exhilaration of autumn, or pure and undefiled in winter snow. Each time, each season has its message, its particular excellence, and we find in the garden, beautiful or dull, fair or grim, that which is already in our own hearts. We may search the world for beauty, for tranquillity, for joy, and search in vain, unless we take it with us on our travels in the strong box of our own souls. In every garden in Japan those three things are planted, and we may enjoy them as freely as their owners, if we have the sun in our hearts to make the flowers bloom.
- ↑ A small specimen of this may be seen in the Hakone Garden in Chapter VI. page 82.
- ↑ It is the good Rein, I think, who says that only the wild flowers of the Mississippi Valley can surpass, in variety and beauty, the flora of Japan, but although early affection for Arkansas and Missouri wild flowers would prejudice me in their favour, I am sure Japan can boast more (Sir Joseph Hooker bears me out in this, I see). Indeed, it must be so, for she has almost all the American plants and trees, and those of China, Formosa, and Manchuria as well,—temperate, tropic, even Alpine or Arctic flowers.
- ↑ Bashō, translated by W. G. Aston.