A More Excellent Way

‘You like I show you?’ said Hanako san.

We are neighbors on an island in Puget Sound, Hanako san and I. We had been talking about gardens. Hanako san had told me, in her pretty, uncertain English, about her father’s ‘very nize garden’ in Japan. And then she spoke of ‘a new way to plant flowers’ that she, with other Japanese ladies, had been taught.

The ten-year-old son, Ritsuro, who is interpreter when she must have recourse to Japanese, sometimes translates his mother’s English, too.

‘My mother means to say,’ he put in at this point, ‘a way to plant, not by the roots, but when the leaves and flowers go into the houses.’

‘A way to arrange cut flowers?’ I suggested.

‘Perhaps maybe so,’ said Ritsuro, and Hanako san repeated with shy eagerness, ‘You like I show you?’

‘Could you show me, Hanako san?’ I answered. ‘I should like it very much, but I have read that it takes many lessons and long training to understand Japanese flower arrangement.’

‘Zis new planting,’ she replied, and added firmly, ‘Zis afternoon I show you.’ Then, gravely, ‘Anyway, beeg-inning.’

The English of Hanako san is my delight. It is largely a matter of nouns, pronouns, and adjectives. For verbs in all their tenses the present participle proves adequate. Articles are superfluous. The letter l turns to r on her tongue; th and s are z. Her enunciation is exquisitely pure and her voice as soft as the lisping of the cedar waxwings in the fir trees at our door.

When the time came for our lesson, it was Ritsuro who arrived first. He carried an armful of evergreen huckleberry (Vaccinium ovatum, a characteristic native growth on Puget Sound), sword fern and holly fern, and a handful of small bright-colored flowers.

Then came Hanako san, bringing strong garden scissors and a small sharp knife.

We showed her all the bowls and jars and vases that we use for flowers, but she shook her head. The jars and vases she dismissed at once. The bowls she found too small, and too deep for her purpose.

‘May I go here? ’ she asked at the kitchen door.

Carefully she scrutinized the cupboard. Now and again she took down a soup plate or a dish. ‘ Platter very good,’ she said, but my shelves revealed none that would serve her purpose. Finally she selected a shallow twelve-inch pan of gray granite ware.

‘You having potato?’ she inquired, and laughed like a child at my astonishment.

With the pan and half a dozen potatoes she returned to the living room, and put these with the heaped-up greenery and flowers.

After long scrutiny, she chose a rather broad potato and cut from the middle two pieces, one about two inches wide, the other perhaps three quarters of an inch. She placed these in the pan with much deliberation, the larger piece a little to the left of the centre, the smaller at the far edge to the right. They were later often lifted from the pan, but their relative position had evidently been determined first of all. After that, as each twig and flower was selected, Hanako san made a cut in the bit of potato, and behold, a perfect stem holder! The incisions could, of course, be made at any angle, and, once in place, the potato gripped the flower as in a vise.

To my Western impatience it seemed a long time before Hanako san chose the first bit of Vaccinium for her ‘planting.’ When it was thrust into the larger potato stem holder, I exclaimed over the beauty of the pink and white blossoms, each looking like a tiny incandescent light, pendent from the under side of the red-brown stem below the glossy dark green of the older leaves, the tender pale green of the new shoots, and the bronze-pink leaflets at the very tip.

Hanako san hardly appeared to notice the flower bells, though they were like lilies of the valley and arbutus for fragrant loveliness. She scrutinized the branch from every angle. Then she took it out of the holder and cut off part of the stem. After replacing the branch, she held near it half a dozen other bits of greenery. Then she cut off one of the pale green and pink tips; I barely restrained a protest, the spray had seemed to me so perfect.

As she thrust other stems into the potato, Hanako san’s attention reverted constantly to that tallest spray. She clipped it repeatedly, sometimes taking only a leaf, sometimes a whole branchlet. When she had finished, that bit of evergreen Vaccinium stood among the sprays that surrounded it like a tiny stately tree. It made one think of Igdrasil, the tree of life. Protectingly it stretched one little branch across and just beyond the pan.

As the lesson went forward, it became always more evident that here was an affair of relation and proportion rather than selection of individual sprays or blossoms. The work already done was constantly criticized and revised in the light of the work in progress.

Next to the little branch that stood so like a tree above the rest, grave choice was made among the long-stemmed flowers. At last Hanako san selected a stalk of valerian, the kind we know as summer heliotrope, its white flowerets just shading into lavender. Next she took two wiry-stemmed bachelor’sbuttons, pale blue as a robin’s egg. The valerian lifted its head among the lower branches of the Vaccinium; the ragged robin flowerets touched the valerian blossoms. Grouped with these, but not quite so tall, were other sprays of the evergreen huckleberry, delicately varied in size and shape and looking, before Hanako san was satisfied, as if they might have grown just where they stood.

The color effect, up to this point, was made by shades of green, and by white just shading into the faintest tints — pink, lavender, and blue. Suddenly Hanako san took tiny bits of greenery and many brighthued little flowers. With these she filled the smaller stem holder. Others were strewn, as if a lavish hand had tossed them there, about the low rim of the pan, — ferns, crimson daisies, yellow mustard, crane’sbill, poppies, anemones, a red wild rose, the motleyest array, — below the rest and carpeting the whole.

With half a dozen final strokes, Hanako san cut a long frond of sword fern into bits. Like all the rest, each piece was measured with a watchful eye.

‘To hide potato,’ said Hanako san. It was her first remark since the beginning of the lesson. Perhaps it was a sop to Western practicality.

She put the completed ‘planting’ on our low broad mantelpiece. Then she sat down on the opposite side of the room and, with folded hands, regarded her finished handiwork.

‘I zink zat’s nize,’ she said at last.

We thought so, too. We asked her questions that she did not understand. Was there an unchanging rule for the arrangement? Was there a law of color selection? She looked at us, puzzled and smiling.

We looked for help to Ritsuro, still as a Buddha on the chimney seat. Truth, the relentless mistress who mars so many stories, bids me say that Ritsuro was wrapped in the comic supplement of the Seattle Sunday Times. No aid came from that quarter.

So we, too, folded our hands and waited, looking at the flowers.

At last Hanako san crossed the room softly and touched them, one by one. First the Oriental Igdrasil. ‘Zis, heaven,’ she said. ‘ Zis,’ — she indicated the tallest blossoms,— ‘zis, peoples. Zis,’ — a wave of the little tawny hand took in the carpeting of low-set flowers, — ‘zis, earth.’

‘Is it always so?’ we asked.

‘All ze time,’ she answered.

‘Hanako san,’ I said, after a silence, ‘one often reads that there must be this grouping of three parts in Nipponese flower arrangement, but the books I know speak of three upright sprays, balanced, and differing in height.’

Ritsuro, with a regretful backward look at Maggie Jiggs, tore himself away from the funnies to put that into Japanese.

His mother pondered for a moment. Then her slim hand drew in the air the outline of a tall vase with the three upright sprays familiar to us all.

‘Zat old way,’ she said. ‘Zis new planting.’ Again a silence, a search for words. The little son could not help her, even the wise little son who knew English as she, Hanako san, knew Japanese.

‘New planting,’ she began again, standing by her flowers, ‘always same way as zis way.’ The small hand swept from right to left, upward like a sea gull skimming the water and lifting suddenly: ‘Earth — peoples — heaven.’

It was my husband who first realized the geometrical figure that must always dominate ‘new planting’ — an outline softened, decorated, blurred, but never lost, a figure much like digamma of the old Greek alphabet, its dominating line the arm of heaven, which shelters the peoples and reaches beyond the end of the earth, that little Oriental Igdrasil.

When he spoke of it, Hanako san nodded vehemently, her face all brightness because her work was understood at last.

Again her hand made the pretty sweeping gesture, this time from left to right, from the highest point to the lowest, as a bird swoops down to cover her nestlings.

‘Heaven, peoples, earth,’ said Hanako san.

HENDERSON DAINGERFIELD NORMAN