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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.”
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I had no answer. At my feet were tall white lilies, each with a golden heart. Over my head a magnolia was in bloom.
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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.”
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III
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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.
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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.
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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.
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“Has the beggar gone?” I asked.
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“No—he is still there,” she answered.
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“Oh! He defeated you in argument, did he?” I pressed her.
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“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 hadn’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.”
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IV
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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V
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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 for a 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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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 Peiping, 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.
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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.
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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.
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