Fragments From a Flower Diary
CHINESE PROVERB
I
IT was in northern Hopei. The clouds had failed to gather in their season, and the time of showers had passed without rain. Parched by the midsummer sun, the earth was a dull beige in color. We had traveled three days over plains, valleys, and hills and seen nothing green except in the artificially irrigated plots near hamlets.
The ancient stone-paved trail led up along a narrow ledge. We waited at the foot for a line of pack coolies to come down. They were heavily laden with inland produce which they were transporting to the coast for foreign export. The containers roped on their backs towered high above their heads. Yet, despite his burden, the foremost man swerved out suddenly to the very edge of the cliff, and, as they came on, each of the nine men behind him did the same.
When they had passed us, we began our climb. My pack coolie was before me. When I came up to the place round which the others had swerved, he had squatted down and was pouring the last of the contents of his drinking canteen into a crevice in the paving. There, through the dust between the stones, a wild rose had grown — a slender fragile tendril with five pale leaves and an open flower. A perfect flower, beautifully tinted, and sweetly fragrant. ‘ It is from such a one as this,’ my coolie said, ‘that we learn fortitude.’
II
It was in the province of Kwangtung. The temple had once been beautifully furnished, but was now dirty and neglected. I chided the abbot concerning the dust on a Buddha’s face. He did not answer me immediately. He led me across two courtyards and along a dark narrow passage.
At the end of the passage he opened a door and motioned to me to pass him and go through it. Beyond the door, I stood in a tiny garden above a deep ravine. All was neat and tidy there. No weeds grew in the rich, muchworked loam. A low wall of carefully placed rocks kept the garden from sliding down the mountain side.
In his garden, the abbot spoke to me, saying, ‘The furniture on an altar is but the symbol of religion ... in the face of a flower the heart of God is revealed.’
I had no answer. At my feet were tall white lilies, each with a golden heart. Over my head a magnolia was in bloom.
Lifting a clump of pansies with a careful trowel, the abbot planted them in an earthen pot. ‘Take this home,’ he said. ‘If you are one who sincerely seeks the truth, by living with a flower you will find it.’
III
Bald-the-third, my serving matron, was stiff with anger. A filthy beggar had erected a mat shed against the wall of our residence at Nanking, and settled down to live just by the gate which led from our garden to the hill path.
He would have to go, she declared. Disease would be carried over the wall by every breeze. We should all be sick. Probably Small Girl would die of cholera.
Bald-the-third went out to clear him away. Sometime later I discovered her seated on the sewing-room floor hemstitching a sheet, an occupation she often uses to calm herself when she has been overwrought.
‘Has the beggar gone?’ I asked.
‘No — he is still there,’ she answered.
‘Oh! He defeated you in argument, did he?’ I pressed her.
‘I did not speak to him,’ she said. ‘He has a sprig of jasmine growing in a broken pot, and has given it the least drafty place in his miserable shelter. He certainly had n’t much tea, but he was sharing what he had with the flower. I do not think that such a man will do us any harm. People can be too concerned regarding physical health and neglect the health of the spirit. I’ve sent him out a gift of rice and fish.’
IV
The Chinese love of flowers has been rewarded by genius in their cultivation. Certainly this is a transcendent capacity for taking trouble. Aided by their lovers’ patient skill, blossoms open for their festivals all over the land despite the diversity of climate which makes the weather below zero in some districts when it is swelteringly hot in others.
Flowers are coddled, nursed, and coaxed. They are fed religiously. There is a vast lore of wisdom passed orally from generation to generation concerning the whims and peculiarities of different plants — also a voluminous detailed gardening literature in which the observations of centuries are garnered. In the House of Exile library there are forty books, considered classics, on the culture of chrysanthemums only, and nearly as many relating to dwarf trees.
In heat, plants are sheltered in the coolest places in the homestead, and shades are erected for blossoming trees, vines, and flowers which are stationary. I have seen people sit all through the breathless tropic noon fanning a drooping flower. In cold, plants are housed in paper shelters, their roots set in loam warmed by subterranean air pipes heated by buried charcoal.
These are constructed to-day exactly as decreed by a ruler of the state of Wei who lived more than two thousand years ago. He ordered that they should be so simply designed that even the poorest and the stupidest of his people might make one. In the most severe weather, florists clothe buds in little paper coats perforated with breathing holes.
Although they perform an infinite amount of toil in bringing their flowers to perfection, florists charge astonishingly low prices. A florist once explained this to me. He told me that a country in which flowers — a necessity for the refinement of the heart — were priced so as to make them a luxury was a country which had yet to learn the first principles of civilization.
V
According to Chinese legend, a flower presides over each month of the year, celebrating her anniversary on the fifth day after the rise of the new moon. It is usual fora minstrel, when he knocks at a homestead gate on a flower birthday, to ask to come in and sing the flower’s ballads. Many tea shops have a story-teller as an attraction to patrons; and, passing on a flower’s day, I have often heard the blind-man entertaining the laborers, who gather round him when the day’s toil is done, with the flower’s fables.
Narcissus is hostess of the first month, violet of the second, peach blossom of the third, which is a favorite month for weddings. In China the peach blossom is the wedding flower as the orange blossom is in America, and in ancient times marriage was celebrated with a festival at the season of the flowering of the peach orchards. Peony gives her name to the fourth month, but rose presides over the month. This is because ‘the peony is the millionaire’s flower, symbol of riches and power; but the lovely rose belongs to everyone, as she graces cottage and palace impartially with her beauty.’
The gentle jasmine is hostess of the fifth month. The lotus, symbol of purity because she grows out of the mud and is not soiled, reigns over the sixth month; balsam, famous for healing virtues, over the seventh; cassia flower, so small but so fragrant, over the eighth; chrysanthemum, beloved of scholars, over the ninth. Bright cheerful marigold is hostess of the tenth month; camellia of the eleventh; the flowering winter plum, whose petals are like the snowflakes, of the twelfth.
And that no flower shall feel neglected, just because there are not enough months for all, a Birthday of All Flowers is celebrated on the twelfth day of the second month.
On All Flowers’ Day it is polite to make ‘flower calls,’ taking gifts of seeds and slips to one’s friends. Every flower birthday is an appropriate occasion for a party. It is not even necessary to possess a garden to give a blossom tea. I know a Chinese lady in Peking, an invalid with neither the means nor the strength to achieve a garden, who has a blossom tea every year. A branch of her neighbor’s wisteria extends over her courtyard wall, and each spring, when the wisteria flowers, she asks her friends to come. One year the wisteria did not bloom. She had her party, gay as the previous ones, in memory of the blossoms.
Wealthy families, who can, often give parties which are magnificent flower shows. These usually begin in the morning and last until well into the evening. After sunset the homestead is lit with silk lanterns placed to show each plant or flowering tree to the best advantage. Good manners permit one to go for as long or as short a time as one chooses.
Chinese people do not like to cut their flowers, and seldom do. The flowers displayed at a party are growing, either in pots or in the ground. Poetry and art through the centuries have endowed each tree, vine, and plant with a symbolic significance, and the cultured are guided by this in their arrangement. In the home of a scholar one is certain to see the ‘three friends’ — that is, the bamboo, the pine, and the plum — grouped together.
The purpose of a flower party is to view the flowers, and tables for cards or mah jongg are considered in bad taste. Sometimes there is an open-air stage on which actors play the flower classics. At one party I attended, the little children of the house, dressed in flower costumes, danced a flower ballet of their own improvisation. Often someone who reads well is asked to read flower poetry.
Flower picnics are also popular. The Lins give an orchard party when the fruit trees bloom each year. Friends make up travel parties and go from all over China to admire the azaleas near Ningpo. When the lovely lotus opens her tulip-shaped blossoms in the shallow bays of the water highways, families in every province give boat picnics.
When I was preparing to attend the first dower festival to which I was invited, my mother-by-affection spoke to me about my dress. ‘One should honor the occasion by care in one’s costume,’ Shun-ko said. ’But according to an ancient rule of decorum observed by the refined of heart, it is impolite to outdress the flowers. The flower-party gown should be dainty, clean, delicate in color, and fashioned on simple lines. A new fashion, however lovely, is out of place at a flower’s party. The courteous hostess and her guests remember that it is to celebrate the flowers that people are gathered, and to wear a gown which distracts attention from the blossoms is rude.’
VI
I had been abroad for six months. Shortly after my return I needed a length of silk. I went to the place where Shih, the silk merchant, had opened a new shop just before I went away. The place was closed and appeared uninhabited. I made inquiry and I was told that he had gone back to his old address, where his father and his grandfather before him had done business.
I found him there. When I had made my selection and my bargain, over a cup of tea, I asked why he had left the Big Horse Road. He replied that it was not a good location.
‘It is such a prominent place,’ I said in astonishment. ’Did n’t you find that you had more customers there than here?’
‘A merchant,’ he informed me, ‘lives the major part of his life with his customers. The place was too prominent. Many came in just because it was convenient. They had long purses and they paid, but money is not everything.’
The merchant’s son, a boy of fourteen and heir to the business, further enlightened me. ‘This place is better for the future of our house,’ he said. ‘On the Big Horse Road there was one who came who let the breath of February blow in on a flowering plum tree which we had set on the counter for the delight of gentlefolk.’
VII
I had lost my way and I had need to ask a policeman for direction. I drew my car up to the curb and waited. The policeman was occupied. Dressed in the splendid uniform copied from the city of San Francisco in which the American-educated governor of the towm had clad all his republican police, this one was busy. Using his teapot as a watering can, he was watering the phlox which he had placed around his stance on the modern concrete road.
When he had finished, he gave me the information I requested. But before he signaled the permission for me to move on into the traffic he made a statement and asked a question: ‘There is no day in the year when flowers fail to bless China with their lovely charm,’ and, ‘Is this also so in the Outer World?’