Japanese Gardens/Chapter 14
CHAPTER XIV
FLOWER ARRANGEMENT
“Seven plants I send you, on a bamboo stand,
Each symbolizing Life, happy and long.”
Princess Shirakawa, with a gift of grasses,
at the New Year
It can hardly be pretended that this is a true garden topic, but so much garden lore and cult is included in its study that it would seem a pity to exclude it. The main scientific principle which is its basis is the same as that of the landscape artist—that is, a representation of Nature on a small scale. It is, like the tea-tray gardens, a display of a portion of scenery for the house and for intimate contemplation, and is always more than a simple bunch of flowers in a vase, or a bit of interior decoration. It is a method of artistic composition, too, like Japanese gardens, depending less on masses of colour and brilliancy of bloom than on the disposition of line, on effects of light and shade obtained by the relief of blocks of foliage, by the slender lines of stems. In a word, both depend more on the drawing than on the colouring of the picture, although this does not imply that, to a cultivated eye, the colour is ever absent.
To the art of flower arrangement I came with a more spontaneous liking than I ever felt for Hachi Niwa, and I seriously think the Japanese are the only people in the world who really understand it. O Tourists of the great hotels of the Treaty Ports, dispute me not, from your memory of the atrocities of hideous crammed bunches of violently conflicting hues, in ugly vases, that took away your appetites when you sat down to breakfast! O Tourists who frequent foreign hotels anywhere in Japan, but still have no acquaintance with the out-of-the-way inns and private houses of the country, deny it not, for you do not know!
Wherever the Westerner has set his foot, and demands foreign food, a tablecloth and forks, he must, in acquiring these, give up the more spiritual luxury of daintily and pleasingly arranged flowers. He can get them both, but he must prove himself worthy. We spent a summer at a dear little primitive inn at Hakone, where the floral display on the tables in the dining-room profaned all sanctities of art; such monstrous mixtures as scarlet Geraniums, crimson Phlox, magenta Dahlias, and purple Zinneas were exhibited, thrust as thick as they could be crowded into tumblers or horrible coloured glass vases.
The change back to Japanese methods was all done by kindness. I began by thanking the nésan for the fresh flowers, and went on by asking her to take away all but those of one colour, to delight some one else who had not had so much magnificence thrust upon her. Then I took a hand myself, and my table-mates with me, and we brought in wild flowers—a few, with some graceful grasses; and I unearthed a Japanese basket with a bamboo water-holder inside, as a vase. Then the O Kami San began to take an interest, and brought us flowers in a tall well-shaped Japanese jar; and finally the lordly proprietor himself took to seeing that our table boasted a charming arrangement, simple and beautiful, which was changed nearly every day. And so it was at every hotel we went to. If the Japanese servants see that the foreigner takes an interest—more, that he appreciates their methods, and prefers them to what they fondly fancy are his own, they will spare no trouble to place real masterpieces of composition before him. On the other hand, in out-of-the-way places, where the chance foreigner may happen to be an overbearing, half-educated, and wholly crass clerklet from a Treaty Port, who despises, in Japan, a daintiness, a fastidiousness of detail that he would not be likely ever to have seen in the haunts of his own class in his own country, woe betide the tourist of finer feeling who follows him! If such a one jeers at the beautiful, nearly bare branches of Plum blossom that a Japanese is on his knees before (almost literally), those of better taste who come after him will probably have no opportunity to flout such a composition, for it will be kept strictly to the Japanese quarters, where it will be justly appreciated. In his book on Japan Mr. Tyndale told a sad tale of this sort, of some young blades from Yokohama, at Atami, who drove out ‘those twigs’ and adorned their Christmas table with champagne and ‘Black and White’ whisky bottles instead. The little hurt and disgusted landlady did not say one word in deprecation, nor mentioned the Biblical porker as she took out her pearl-strung boughs of bloom. And this was not because the substituted bottles were ‘for the good of the ’ouse,’ and represented a greater pecuniary advantage to herself, either.
Shortly before Young America and I had been permitted to assist in the manufacture of Hachi Niwa, I had begun, with a Japanese teacher, to study the art of flower arrangement. The friend with whom I was travelling, a Lady from California (it all requires capitals), said, “What do you want to study that for? I guess you can beat a Jap any day at that job. They take three hours to put an ugly old bare stalk and two Irises in a bowl, and then they all make as much fuss and cackle over it as a hen does over an egg. Waste of time, I call it!”
But I liked to waste my time in that way, and while she helped our little maid to make beautiful ‘shirt waists’ for herself on the sewing-machine, I worked among the fragrant twigs of Pine, with Cherry branches, delicate, drooping grasses, and Chrysanthemums. A dear little Japanese lady, a friend of mine, got me the teacher—for they are always to be found. Every well-bred woman has studied this graceful art, without which she is not considered properly educated, in Japan. Such an ugly old woman this teacher was, with a name which meant ‘Wave of the Sea.’ She was an old-timer, with no modern notions, and it was a horror to me to look up from my work to find her grinning at me with glistening blackened teeth. (I like all the old survivals except the blackened teeth and shaven eyebrows of the married women.) She had not one word of English, and I very few of Japanese, and the books my little friend brought me were in characters I could not decipher; but gestures were eloquent, pictures told much, deeds spoke louder than words; there were tongues in the tree branches and intelligence in the Irises, so we progressed. And then some Japanese friends, who had of course studied the art, helped, too, by translating the directions into such dear, quaint
English. I spent several months very happily at the work, putting love and patience into it; but so great are its difficulties that I am still but a crude beginner.
The art—it is almost unnecessary to say—came from China, along with all the other garden and floral lore. The great Sen-no-Rikiu, landscape artist, high priest of the tea ceremonial, æsthete, and scholar, introduced it into Japan in the sixteenth century, when he elaborated the allied arts of garden planning and the ceremony of the tea-drinking to take place there. Confucianism was also concerned in the cult, and the rules laid down were according to the active and passive principles of Nature,[1] which the Japanese convert into the vigorous male, displayed and relieved by the quieter and humbler female qualities; just as, in their gardens, stones and plants are bound by those traditions and ideas. It would take more time and space than I can spare to this subject to explain the subtle and sometimes far-fetched notions that this involves.
The basis of the rules is triangulation. Old art lectures came back to me as I began to understand that this subtlest of Eastern æsthetics had, for groundwork principles, exactly what the most recent of Western arts owned. The eye is thus focused on the whole design, or rather on the point of the whole design; for two sides of the triangle are longer than the third,—I need not say that a mathematical measurement is not taken of the material before it is used,—and the eye does not wander vaguely all over the group, seeking the motif.
Roughly speaking, and simply put, one takes three sprays of the chosen branch or flower, or three, in all, of the combination of plants to be used, and places the longest one in the middle, its end curved over like a bow. Then on one side is put another piece, about half its size, while on the other side is placed the third spray, half as long again as the second, and therefore half-way between the two others in length. Now, as I say, this is roughly speaking, for, although here is the fundamental principle, no stiff or angular design will pass, and the composition must be, above all things, free and natural-looking. No one would believe, who had not tried it, how difficult this is of attainment. One does not merely ‘stick in a few twigs’ by any means. To get just the curve one wants (or ought to have!), the branch may have to be heated gently over a brazier so as to make it more pliable, and to allow it to be bent, without breaking, into the desired attitude. Then stiffer sorts of plants have little notches cut in the lower and upper sides of the stem, and one will be squeezed together while the other will have a wedge of bamboo stuck into it to curve it out properly. In sprays of Pine I have had to put in half a dozen of these blocks to get the thing into shape, and even then my critical teacher was not satisfied. Sometimes, when our material was very disobliging, we had to tie the recalcitrant limbs into the proper pose, using perhaps fine, invisible wire, or, in inconspicuous places, wood fibre, for the purpose. In learning to do this I got some insight also into the way in which trees are helped to grow in nursery gardens—the method by which the young plant is taught how to shoot in Japan. In flower arrangement we never went so far as to fasten the branches to a bamboo where a straight line was wanted (it never was wanted, however!), but I often longed to tie my poor cut bough to something, as an invisible curve was such an intangible thing to work by! One scheme my ugly, nice little teacher taught me was to make a series of indentations—they were hardly real cuts—all along the inner surface of a stem that was to be bent. I never got at all adept with Irises, and my arrangement of them was always stiff and conventional compared with hers, but I managed very fairly well with Cherry and Maple boughs. Chrysanthemums simply managed themselves, but Pine was ever unruly, and, like a curly-headed child who resents the brush, always managed to look (to my eye, at least) beautiful in its own independent way, as if unaffected by my failure or success.
But the bending of the twig was only part of the training. A great field of study lay before me—of the flowers and leaves appropriate to different occasions, the sentiments which attached to the various plants, and all the poetical and literary allusions which the worker, thoroughly versed in the art, implied by his selection and arrangement. Our old editions of The Language of Flowers, which I used to pore over as a child, were nothing to that. One ought to know the whole literature of Japan by heart and have an almost equally good knowledge of the Chinese classic authors, be deeply imbued with Buddhist and Shinto lore, know something of India, and have, into the bargain, a poetic mind, in order to understand all the subtleties of the subject.
Mr. Basil Hall Chamberlain, in writing on the art of flower arrangement, as usual when touching on their æsthetics does not do the Japanese justice. He is really never in sympathy with the artistic side of the Japanese character, and is always inclined to gentle raillery on those subjects, chaffing mildly whenever he has occasion to mention any of the delicacies and refinements of art which the Western world is only now beginning to appreciate. He avers that colour is not the key-note of the composition, but line, and the balance of proportion; which is true enough, except that he implies a lack of colour sense on the part of the Japanese, which is far from being a fact. As I have more than once stated in this book, the Japanese colour sense is so delicate, the perception of harmonies so fine, that people of bolder and coarser feeling are not competent to judge them. In grey, the ‘Artist’s Colour,’ they find their chiefest delight; in soft mauves, faint blues, mellow fawns and browns, they are content. They do not care for blazing branches of Maple in the house—the takenomo seldom displays flamboyant bouquets of highly tinted flowers. The chastity, almost austere harmony, of a Japanese room, with its honey-coloured mats, its pale diffused lighting from paper-covered windows (like bright moonlight, or as if snow lay outside), is seldom broken by any flowers more gaily hued than silk-petalled Irises, Plum or rosy Cherry blossoms, or the sombre branches of Pine. Sometimes the only decoration in the whole room—for there never is any furniture, as all the world knows, and everything decorative is placed in the sacred niche—is an old block of half-decayed wood, covered with delicately beautiful, silvery fungi. A lichen-covered stone of good shape is often seen also, or some curious piece of wreckage from the beach, which has been painted warm iodine-greys and blues and purples by the action of the sea; or perhaps it may be a thick, gnarled stem of an ancient Pine bough, sawn through horizontally, with one picturesque needled spray thrusting itself out sideways from it, which has the place of honour. Again, a naked tree-branch, in Western eyes only prospectively good to look upon because of its swelling buds, will delight a Japanese family for a week or two. The exquisite lines of branch and twig are not lost on them, and they will see the coming of spring evolve out of the promise of winter, watching its development as they would the growth of a loved and lovely child.
Here again we find that poetic suggestion which is the great uplifting factor in all their arts. While their delight in the quaint, the fanciful is as unforced as a child’s, as keenly appreciative as a latter-day Parisian artist’s, their real eminence is due to the spiritual idea which they make the basis of their feeling for beauty.
The wide-topped jar or vase of bronze or porcelain, or perhaps only of bamboo, in which the flower composition is placed, is in itself almost sufficient decoration for a room, so pure and satisfying are its hues, so deep and cool is its tone, so fine its texture. Then it is set upon a black-wood or lacquered stand or pedestal of classic shape, which gives added dignity to the whole. Owing to the wideness of the flat, open mouths of the receptacle usually employed, and the few sprays used, it is no mean task to make the separate branches ‘stay put’ in the water, and they have to be carefully blocked into place with neat little wedges of bamboo.
There are other receptacles, besides these open vases and flat-topped jars, in infinite variety—wicker baskets twisted and stained so that they resemble bronze; bamboo in a dozen different forms and shapes, as rafts, as buckets, as plain flower-holders; and almost as great stress is laid on the proper selection of these as on the arrangement to be put into them. For example, a bamboo stand for a wedding celebration must show no cut. That would be bad luck and bad taste, symbolic of a broken faith, a severed and maimed affection.
After these rudimentary principles have been learned, there are still many other phases of the cult to be studied—how many leaves should be left on a twig, for instance (in Bamboo, this number should be three or five); what plants may be combined to express a sentiment, etc. Of the more involved methods of setting out flowers, so that a particular place or poetical idea is suggested, I can say nothing. It is far beyond the elementary stage of my training; indeed, I doubt if any foreigner—bar Mr. Conder—could speak on this point with authority, so erudite is the cult. I quote the latter on the subject of the Pine used at the ‘Moon-viewing Festival’:—
“Moon-viewing is at all times a favourite pastime of the Japanese, but the great Moon Festival of the year is on the fifteenth day of the eighth month. The more important dwellings have a special chamber from which the sight of the moonlit landscape can be enjoyed. The floral arrangement occupies the recess of the chamber, and has of course no real connexion with the outside prospect; but in the flower composition itself the moonlit landscape is expressed. A branch of Pine tree is used, and between the principal and secondary lines of the composition a special branch is introduced, fancifully called the ‘moon-shadow branch’; a hollow gap is also formed between the foliage, bounded by a special branch called the ‘dividing branch.’ In the composition the idea is to suggest both the opening through which the moon can be partially observed and the dark branch which appears to cross its surface. To fully appreciate the analogy, one must be familiar with the scenery of Japan, and have seen, on a clear night, the irregular Pine trees standing out against the moonlit heavens.”
Aquatic plants have particular methods used for their display, and some of the loveliest compositions I have seen were of this sort. Irises had little weighted clamps, like this, 
put on their feet, which enabled them to stand up like lead soldiers, in a shallow, pale green dish; and then these shoes of theirs were hidden with clean white pebbles, and the tiniest of gold-fish were set to swim about in the clear water with which they were covered.
Narcissus Tazetti, in the winter, is used in the same way (without shoes, however), and in this decoration the Chinese are nearly as clever as their one-time pupils, the Japanese. As in China, too, this is a favourite decoration at the New Year, and is one always obtainable, as the bulbs are so easily forced. One cannot wonder that Narcissus died of love for himself, these flowers of his are so beautiful, reflected in the mirror of clear water.
Another time, from out of a crystal bowl sprang a few stalks of arrow-shaped leaves, and in and out among the pale amber roots, as richly decorative as any part of the scheme, darted those glittering butterflies of the water, the gold-fish.
This recalls an incident which happened about that time, when Young America took to gardening. Some pretty little geishas, who had met the child on the street, brought him a globe of gold-fish as a present. We had been planting Morning Glory seed in blue and white pots in the veranda that day, and had dilated at length on the beauties that were in store for us when they should grow up and bloom. As we were finishing some visitors arrived, and if wicked pride had not impelled us to exhibit our neatly-planted pots before we gave them tea, it would have been all over with the gold-fish. The sweet, blue-eyed, fluffy-haired little angel was planting them! “An’ when dey drow up, I will have lots and lots of ’ittle fishes, mudder,” he shouted joyously. We were just in time to stop this scientific effort to grow a goldfish Vine.
It requires a liberal education to know what flowers, or combination of plants, to send as a gift in Japan. I found I had committed an enormity in selecting pink and white Lotuses for a christening, as they are associated with funerals and Buddhist shrines only. At New Year a gift of flowers should be a delightful arrangement of Pine (suggesting long life) and Plum blossoms (spiritual beauty); Bamboo may be added, as that also means long life and strength, as the Pine does, and uprightness as well. A tiny Orange tree laden with fruit, which indicates prosperity, is also a proper gift at that season. Various grasses are appropriate then too, as the poem at the beginning of this chapter indicates. On the Little Girls’ birthday—always on the fifth day of the fifth month—Peach blossom must adorn the niche, and with dolls may be sent as presents to the tiny lady. For weddings there are many beautiful and symbolic compositions. Of one of these Mr. Conder speaks thus:—
“At wedding feasts a double arrangement in a pair of similar standing vases is employed. For this purpose a branch of the male Pine is placed in one vessel, and a branch of the female Pine in the other. The general form of each design would be similar, but the branch of the female Pine facing the opposite vase should stretch a little beneath the corresponding branch of the male Pine. These together are called the ‘Destiny-uniting’ branches, and the complete design is said to typify eternal union.”
These same male and female Pines stand guard at all the gates at the New Year; the sharp and stubbly Thunbergii on the left, which is the side of honour in Japan, representing the man, and the graceful P. densiflora taking the woman’s lesser place.
And so it goes on; and when all is arranged, and the chosen bloom or branch is set out in the sacred niche, a charming ceremonial of admiration is gone through. It is almost a kind of worship of beauty. The adorer falls on his knees in front of the raised alcove, and bows his head to the ground, his palms pressed flat on the straw matting in front of him. Three times he does this; each time he lifts his head, drawing a deep sighing breath of contentment as his eyes fall on the flowers. Then for long he sits in silent contemplation, taking into his soul something that is fine and pure and good, that emanates like perfume from them. Oh, the jewel of serenity and peace in the Lotus, or the poorest twig, so viewed!
It is a matter of moment, the choice of a gift as well as the arrangement. Once, in buying an offering for a Japanese friend at a nursery garden in Yokohama, I had to give the courteous elderly man who was serving me the most intimate details of her character, station in life, age, and appearance (to which, no doubt, he added his own views as to mine), before he would suggest what would be appropriate from the national point of view. Finally (and partly in consideration of my American birth) the choice fell upon a delightful dwarf Maple, very old, very quaint—and the Lady from California said, “Very ugly and very expensive.” In another book I relate the adventures that befell me and the Maple tree, but suffice it here to say that my friend was delighted, and delicately hinted that my taste in gifts was as that of her own nation. And so the grave little old man got none of the credit for the subtle international compliment.
If I had only thought to send her a poem I should have cleared my conscience and probably have got a charming Japanese verse in return; for every one in Japan writes poems, from the Emperor downward—I even suspected my kurumaya in Kyoto of the practice.
Here is a translation of some fairly typical lines to accompany an arrangement of Pine and Plum blossoms from a woman to her husband; but it must not be forgotten that, circumscribed by convention as their verses are, an original composition must be sent if any is:—
“Oh! sturdy Pine tree spray,
Take to my lord
This loving word,
And let the pearly flowers of the Plum
In fragrance say
From whom, love-weighted, they have come,
This New Year’s Day.”
Poetry is deeply inwoven with this graceful art. Indeed, that is always the most alluring part of the study of anything in Japan—every subject opens up others, even though, as in this case, the one art is long enough for a life’s work. And as sincerity is the touchstone of any real art, so it is of this—sincerity of feeling, of faithful labour, of loving study. “We cannot touch another’s heart with anything less than our own,” and, however humble the means of presentation of an art may be, informed and performed with truth and love it is art. I do not care if it is only an iron fire shovel, or a child’s wooden pail; if it is made with thought and joy in the work, it is a beautiful thing. What, then, of God-wrought flowers and leaves, arranged with the same worship of beauty—shall the art of their use not become a thing of dignity and honour, an uplifting force to him who sees as well as to him who makes? They bring to us the message we have already in our hearts, take from us that which comes from our own souls.
- ↑ “The smug schoolmen … attributed all phenomena to the action of principles without life, which they called Yin and Yang (positive and negative principles of Nature). But how can there be action without life? Certainly the existence of activity presupposes a living God from whom it proceeds.”—From Hirata Atsutane (1776–1845). Translated by W. G. Aston.