The flowers and gardens of Japan

by Florence Du Cane

THE GATE OF THE PLUM GARDENS

morrow or when the storm has cleared. The Japanese regard the flower of the plum with a peculiar reverence, and their feeling for it always seems to be touched with some mysterious sense of sorrow, which perhaps accounted for the fact that these plum-blossom feasts never seemed to attain to the same merry boisterous revels held at the time of the cherry blossom. The people were more quiet and sober in their demeanour; at first I thought their spirits were frozen by the cold, but even the endless drinking of tea and tiny cups of saké did not seem to thaw them, and often whole parties, wrapped in their outer winter kimonos, would sit in silent contemplation of the blossoms, warming their hands over that Japanese apology for a fire—an hibachi—consisting merely of a pot of charcoal.

In old days the plum blossom was their ideal of purity, an ideal which some attempted to emulate in their lives. The same feelings prevail in China, if we may judge from the poets. This, to be sure, is not surprising, inasmuch as Japan took her literature, like most other things, from the Chinese. The early poems of both countries are much alike, and among them both are many ume poems, as the Japanese call them, extolling the beauty and charm of the plum blossom, which ranks as the poet’s own flower. Mr. Kango Uchimura has written an ode to it in prose, which contains the following passage:——

While Spring was still cold I knew that it was at hand by your flowering. You are not Spring, but the prophet of Spring. The cherry blossom is Spring, the iris and the wistaria; but, as each of these has its own season, the gods sent you to keep green our hope of Spring.

I do not say I love you, rather I fear you; you are too dignified; you blossom alone on the branches with no green leaves to bear you company. I do not call you beautiful; your scent is too keen, your petals too stiff. No one will ever sing or dance beneath your boughs. You are the prophet Jeremiah; you are John the Baptist. Standing before you I feel as though in the presence of a solemn master. Yet by your appearance I know that Winter has passed, and that the delightful Spring is at hand. The herald of Spring, you denounce the tyranny of Winter. Your face is stern, but your heart is soft. It is easy to misunderstand you, for, though the daughter of Spring, you wear the garb of a man the man ordained to break the power of cruel Winter.

Two famous men in olden days were particularly associated with the flowers of the plum. One of these was Kajiwara Genda Kagesuge, a great warrior of the twelfth century, who always went into battle carrying in his quiver fresh branches of the blossom, to which, so says the legend, he was indebted for his splendid courage. The other was Sugawara No Michizane, the minister of the Emperor Ude. The Kwampaku Tokihira, wishing to be quit of the sage’s wisdom, sent him into a sort of honourable exile in the island of Kyushu, where he died in 903. After his death came a great reaction in his favour. He was canonised under the name of Tenjin, or the Heavenly god, and to this day he is venerated by all men of letters as their patron saint; in every school the twenty-fifth day of each month is kept as a holiday, and every year on the twenty-fifth of June a great festival is held in his honour. His life is dramatised in the popular play Sugawara Tenjin Ki, and all over the land shrines dedicated to his memory rise from groves of plum-trees.

One of the most famous and beautiful of these is the temple of Kitano Tenjin at Kyoto, which has provided subjects for several of the illustrations in this volume. In the inner court of the temple near the splendid two-storied gateway of the Sun, Moon, and Stars stands a large tree of the bright pink blossom, and it would be difficult to find a more beautiful setting for the tree than the background of grey wooden buildings, of which the decorations have been toned by the hand of time into soft mellow hues. In the outer grounds the trees have a background of giant cryptomerias, with long avenues of stone lanterns—votive offerings of every conceivable shape and size—small shrines, and two great granite torii, the plain yet majestic gateways which guard the entrance to all Shinto temples. When the trees are in all their glory the flower-viewing parties wander through the grounds in silent admiration, down to the little ravine outside the temple grounds, where the snow-white blossom fills the little valley and clouds of petals fall into the brook below, to be carried away down the stream like drifts of foam. Here may be seen a poet of the old school rapt in thought composing an ode to the blossom and the nightingale. It is a pretty fancy much honoured in Japan, the plum blossom, the poet, and the nightingale making, they say, the world of beauty complete. For no Japanese ever thinks of the plum blossom apart from the nightingale—which, it should be observed, is not the bird of Keats’s poem, singing of summer in full-throated ease, but a little light-winged creature whose favourite haunt is among the flowering branches of this tree.

In Japanese legends the plum blossom and the nightingale are inseparable companions, and represent