FROM THE GARDEN OF ZEN: June 2023

June 11, 2023

Water lily flower: Kita-kamakura

As if to make me aware of the stealthy arrival of early summer, the adorable flower of the water lily is blooming like a newborn child on the calm water surface in my small water-lily bowl this year again.

The lifetime of this flower is about four days and it repeatedly opens in the early morning and closes in the afternoon in response to temperature changes. The tender flower that appears on the first morning is especially enchanting, which always makes me sense the mystery of life in the rapid rotating of the seasons.

In the microcosm of the small water-lily bowl, this flower shows its changing appearance every morning, as if to suggest a piece of poetry about the birth and impermanence of a living thing, and eventually fades away like an ephemeral dream.

Water lily flowers: Ofuna Flower Center (Kamakura)

Iwa-tabako (Conandron ramondioides) flowers: Kita-kamakura

I found the small violet flowers of Iwatabako emerging quietly from beneath the glossy leaves spreading on the wet mossy stone wall as if to shyly welcome the long-awaited early summer.

These mystical star-shaped flowers make me imagine that their seeds may have been carried by a shooting star from the distant universe to the earth in far away past.

They symbolize the quiet beginning of summer in the tender greenness of Kita-kamakura region just before the colorful flowers of Ajisai (hydrangea) begin appearing all together everywhere.

Iwa-tabako (Conandron ramondioides) flowers: Kaizo-ji

Hime-utsugi (Deutzia gracilis) flowers: Kaizo-ji

Hime-utsugi is a shrub of the hydrangea family widely distributed in Japan. Because of the beauty of its small silky-white flowers (about 2 cm in diameter) that bloom around the summer rainy season, this plant has long been popular as a material used for flower arrangement and an ornamental garden plant since ancient times.

The hime-utsugi has long been loved and cherished by Japanese people. For example, many Japanese poetries about the Hime-utsugi flowers are found in the Manyo-shu, Japan's oldest of traditional Japanese poems. The name "hime-utsugi" is not used in this anthology, but it is believed that the plants referred to as "utsugi" and "u-no-hana" (white-rabbit flower) may have been hime-utsugi.

Daisy flowers: Ofuna Flower Center

Ayame (iris) flowers: Ofuna Flower Center (Kamakura)

The iris (Hana-shoubu, ayame) is a classical garden plant in Japan, the variety of which was improved mainly during the Edo period ((1603-1868) and there are currently more than 5,000 varieties.

They sprout from around May and grow to a height of 50 cm to 1 m, producing delicate and ephemeral flowers of white, blue, purple, spotted and yellow.

Flowers can be three-petalled, six-petalled or double-petalled and the sword-shaped leaves are narrow and raised with distinct veins.

In Japanese horticulture, there are four main types according to where the variety was bred, which are called Edo, Ise, Higo, Nagai Kosei families. Furthermore, the hybrids of these families, the yellow-flowered varieties bred through interspecific crosses, and varieties bred in foreign countries such as the USA are inherited.

The irises that I photographed in the Ofuna Flower Center belong to a classic strain of the Ofuna iris family. They were bred based on the national export policy during the Taisho period (1912-1926). This breeding was linked to the historical background of the internationalization of modern Japan at the time.

The main person behind this breeding was Bungo Miyazawa, who was the director of the Kanagawa Prefectural Agricultural Experiment Station at the time. Although this station continued only for a short period of time, some 300 varieties were bred by crossing the Edo-type iris varieties available at the time.

The current Ofuna Flower Center is the successor to this Kanagawa Prefectural Agricultural Experiment Station.