the old pæonies every day, you will receive a reward in due course of time,” and disappeared. Kosei found the next morning that new sprouts were beginning to come out from the old roots.
The pæony was introduced into Japan from China in the eighth century, but failed to gain universal popularity, on account of the difficulty of cultivating it successfully; but the Rich Man’s Flower came to be regarded as the king of flowers, and therefore the lion and the peacock, the kings of the animal world, are its companions in art. They are always painted together in the decoration of a temple or palace wall, and when lions dance on the Japanese stage they always have a gorgeous background of pæonies. There may be more of myth than truth in the pretty story of Ichinenko, a kind of pæony, whose flowers turned crimson when Yo Ki Hi (the beloved mistress of the Emperor Genso, famous in Chinese history in connection with the pæony) accidentally touched the petals of the flower with her rouged finger-tips, when she appeared in the garden after finishing her morning toilette.
So strong is the feeling among Japanese poets that the flower is lacking in any poetical grace, that the Hokku[2] poet Hyoroku remarks in his Essay on a Hundred Flowers, “The pæony is like the mistress glorified in one’s love, who acts as she pleases without any consideration for another’s feeling. It has such an attitude, as if it spit out a rainbow into the blue sky.” The poet Bushon, who has written more lines on the pæony than any other poet, says—
Niji wo haite
Hirakanto suru
Botan hana.
(Spitting forth a rainbow
Is about to bloom
The pæony flower.)
[2] Hokku is a poem of seventeen syllables.
CHAPTER XI
AZALEAS
Early in May the brilliant-coloured azaleas seem determined, by the splendour of their hues, to try and outshine their graceful, tender-coloured predecessors the plum, peach, and cherry. Surely no other plants ever equalled their display of colours—every shade—pure white, cream, salmon, pink, scarlet, orange, and purple; but even all this feast of colour will not make up for the delicate colour of the blossoming trees. There are so many different varieties of azalea, so many different ways of planting them, and even such a variety in their natural growth, that it is hard to say in which surroundings they appealed to me most.
The most celebrated place for “viewing azalea blossoms”—Satsuki no hana—in all Japan is in the district of Shinjuku, a suburb of Tokyo, where the show gardens, known as the florists’ gardens of Okubo-mura, present a wealth of colour which I feel powerless to describe. These gardens, or rather azalea plantations, as no other plants are grown, are of very ancient date, and were frequented by the Tokugawa Regents, with whom they were as popular as they are with the sight-seer of to-day. A few sen will suffice to obtain permission to enter a never-ending succession of these little gardens, and so dazzled was I by their splendour that I do not remember that any one seemed more beautiful than another. Imagine these great bushes of immense size and great age simply smothered by their blossoms. Not a leaf was to be seen. My eyes ached at last, and I longed for the repose of a stretch of green. In and out among great banks of the scarlet and crimson Kaba-renge, the variety which flowers before the leaves appear,—on past beds of Azalea indica with its large double and semi-double blooms of every shade, the paths will lead us, as if through a maze; and surely this mass of colour helps to bewilder one. I was assured one venerable old bush, the thickness of whose stem testified to its great age, bore each year eight thousand blooms; so closely packed did the blossoms appear to be, that it would have been no surprise to me had I been told they numbered eight million instead of