Democratic Sentinel, Volume 15, Number 48, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 December 1891 — The Jap Loves Flowers. [ARTICLE]

The Jap Loves Flowers.

In a paper on “The Chief City of the Province of the Gods” Lafcadio Hearn describes a Japanese flower show. He writes: “Often in the streets at night, especially on the nights of sacred festivals (matsuri), one’s attention will be attracted to some small booth by tho spectacle of an admiring and perfectly silent crowd pressing before it As soon as one can get a chance to look one finds there is there is nothing to look at but a few vases containing sprays of flowers, or, perhaps, some light, gracious branches freshly cut from a blossoming tree. It is simply a little flower show, or. more correctly, a fiee exhibition of master skill in the arrangement of flowers. For the Japanese- do not brutally chop off flower heads to work them up into meaningle-s masses of color, as we barbarians do —tnoy love nature too well for that; they know how much the natural ehaim of the flower depends upon Its setting and mounting, its relation to leaf and stem, and they select a single graceful branch or spray just as nature made it. At first you will not, as a western stranger, comprehend such an exhibition at all; you are yet a savage in such matters compared with the commonest coolies about yon. But even while you are still wondering at popular interest in this simple little show the charm of it will begin to grow upon you; and despite your occidental idea of seifsuperiority you will feel humbled by the discovery that all the flower displays you have ever seen abroad were only mon str sities in comparison with the exquisite natural beauty of those few simple sprays. You will also observe how much the white or pale blue screen behind the flowers enhances the effe t b lamp or lantern light. For the screen has been arranged with the special purpose of showing the oxquisiteness of plant shadows, and tho sharp silhouettes of sprays and blossoms cast thereon are beautiful beyond the imagining of any western decorative artist. ”