THE IRIS
If I were to be asked which of all the show gardens in Japan--a garden
devoted to the cultivation of one especial flower--gave me most
pleasure to visit, I should unhesitatingly answer Hori-kiri, the garden
of _hana shobu_ or _Iris Kaempferi_, in the neighbourhood of Tokyo.
Throughout the month of June this garden remains a feast of subdued
colour; for the iris is no gaudy, flaunting flower, but a delicate
blossom shading from pure white, through every shade of mauve and lilac
to rosy purple, and so deep a blue as to be almost black. In the first
days of June the paths winding through the rice fields from the banks
of the river Sumida will be crowded with sight-seers whose steps are
all bent in one direction and with the same intent--to pay their annual
visit to Hori-kiri; and throughout the month this never-ending stream
continues from early dawn until the setting of the sun or the rising
of the moon. Flower-sellers there will be too, one perhaps with only a
modest bunch of half-opened buds in a wooden tub shaded from the sun by
a large umbrella, not the unpicturesque object recalled to our English
minds by the word umbrella, but one made of pale yellow paper, large
and flat, with bamboo ribs, the owner’s name inscribed in bold, black
Chinese characters--or farther on a little stall decked with lanterns,
and a gay-coloured curtain with some device suggestive of the iris;
tiny toys, little fairy baskets of split bamboo with just one iris
blossom, or fans painted with a giant bloom covering the whole fan, and
other dainty trifles, to carry home to the little ones left at home or
as a souvenir of this iris-land.
The garden of Hori-kiri must be of very ancient date, as the fine old
pine-trees, dwarfed and gnarled maple and juniper bushes, are not the
growth of this generation, or even the last. The garden is said to
date from some three centuries, and to be handed down from father to
son, always in the same family. Nothing could be more perfectly laid
out for the proper display of its especial flower, the shaping of
the beds, the placing of the bridges, and even the colouring of the
little summer-houses in which to entertain their host of guests--all
has been thought out by this artistic family; and last, but by no means
least, the clothing of the little maids who wait on them with untiring
zeal--their kimonos and obis all harmonising in colour.
I have lingered too long on the surroundings of the flowers, and the
reader will want to know more of this wonderful flower which deserves
so much attention--it does indeed deserve the attention, for surely
by the middle of the “dew month” it is hard to imagine anything more
beautiful than the scene which meets the eye. Some seventy varieties
of this king of irises are grown, many raised from seed and jealously
treasured by the owner of the garden. There are early and late
varieties, three weeks almost between their time of flowering, but by
the second week in June the second blooms of the early varieties will
have opened and the first blooms of the later ones, so the effect is
as if all were flowering together; every shoot of the plants seems to
bloom; there are no gaps in their serried ranks. The mere variety is
amazing. Some are pure white, only veined with a faint tinge of green;
some have a margin of lilac; some are shaded; some mottled; but surely
the most beautiful of all is just a great single bloom of one shade, be
it white, lilac, or blue. Many people prefer the duplex flowers with
an inner row of small petals, but to me this form seemed to have lost
some of the natural beauty and grace of the true iris. I tried to learn
something of their cultivation, hoping it might be of help to those
who grow those poor specimens known in England as _Iris Kaempferi_. It
is not the plants themselves, or the varieties, which are at fault,
for many thousands of roots leave the Hori-kiri garden every year to
be scattered throughout the world,--it would seem to be the soil and
climate which they resent and stubbornly refuse to adopt; for a few
years they linger and even bravely flower, and then they begin to pine
and droop like some poor home-sick mortal pining for his native land.
August appears to be the especial month for dividing the roots or
replanting them, so that month had better be chosen as the beginning
of the iris year. The yellowing foliage is ruthlessly cut to half its
natural height and the plants divided, for no clump is ever allowed to
grow so large and old that it is hollow in the centre; the outer shoots
appear to be the strongest, and have most promise of bloom for the
following year. The beds are
[Illustration: AN IRIS GARDEN]
sunk a foot or so below the paths; and the rich soil is like a
quagmire, not with standing water, but like swampy ground. In November
the plants are all cut down, in preparation for the first dressing
of manure in December. The liquid sewage is liberally applied, once
towards the end of the year, and then again after an interval of a
few weeks, the final dressing being given in January. By February the
growth has started, and once the young leaves appear there can be no
more manuring, or the foliage would suffer. From now until the time
of flowering, the regulation of the irrigation seems to be the chief
matter to ensure success in their cultivation. Each variety has its own
especial name, generally with some poetical meaning, but difficult for
the European ear to grasp, and I noticed that, no doubt for the sake of
the foreign market, all the rows were numbered as well as named.
Do not imagine that this is the only iris garden of Japan. There are
many others, though I always think that Hori-kiri ranks first, not
only for the beauty of the garden, but the actual flowers seem larger
and better grown than anywhere else. Only a few minutes’ drive from
Hori-kiri will take you to Yoshino-en, celebrated for its wistaria as
well as its irises. The ground is larger than Hori-kiri and the irises
are well grown, but as the garden is not devoted entirely to their
culture the effect is not so pleasing. The whole district almost seemed
devoted to the culture of _shobu_--many, many fields of them I passed;
but as they are grown entirely for the sake of cutting the blooms for
market, there is never any mass of colour to be seen.
The gardens at Kabata, belonging to the Yokohama Nursery Company, are
perhaps the most extensive iris gardens in Japan; I felt almost dazzled
and bewildered by the very size of the grounds--acres of irises--a
beautiful sight; but I never derived the same pleasure from it as from
the smaller garden. The iris is one of the few flowers which seems to
be allowed to enter into the precincts of a true Japanese landscape
garden: in many a private garden a stream will be diverted to feed
an iris bed, placed where a piece of swampy ground would be most in
keeping with the rest of the miniature landscape; or even the margin
of a tiny lake will be utilised for just a few plants of _shobu_. I
remember seeing an old priest tending his little colony of irises,
which no doubt were chosen with great deliberation from a large
collection for some especial beauty. How often have I seen an old man
and woman considering on which particular favourite their few sen shall
be expended, and then departing, the happy possessor of a new treasure
to add to their little store. My friend the priest’s collection all
grew in pots; they did not look as though they would attain their full
height and beauty; but as if to reward the loving care bestowed on them
they all showed promise of flower; and no doubt in due time they will
have been arranged so as to give the best effect and greatest pleasure
to their grower.
I asked a Japanese who, with his little gentle wife, was sitting in
quiet contemplation and evident enjoyment of the scene, to tell me
something of the flower as it appeals to the Japanese, and he said: “We
live here in the choicest floral kingdom; and to our mind the flowers
are beautiful, and we do not ask why or how, the sight of their beauty
is far more real to us than any meaning which they may suggest. You
will find no other nation like Japan, which loves Nature so truly in
her varied forms and holds communion with all her aspects; we love the
iris as a flower, but as nothing else. I cannot make my mind associate
it with any meaning of zeal or chivalry, nor do I think of it as any
messenger; it appeals to me only as a little quiet beauty of the water
side, making friends with the sadness of the rainy season. In our
poems the iris is almost inseparable from water; one of our celebrated
poetesses has written the following seventeen-syllable poem--
Midzu ga kaki,
Midzu ga kashikeri
kakitsubata.
(Water was the painter,
Water again was the eraser
Of the beautiful fleur-de-lis.)
“It is the universal custom throughout Japan to celebrate the fifth
day of May by hanging bunches of _shobu_ beneath the eaves of our
houses, and to put them into the hot water of the public baths, as it
is perfectly delicious for the bathers to inhale their odour. We also
drink _saké_ in which they have been steeped, on the same day. I felt
proud to hear that the fleur-de-lis, as I believe you call the iris,
is the national flower of France, as I like to think that it has found
a home in the West, and when I was told that the flower which was put
above Solomon’s greatest glory was not the lily of our country, but
that of the iris family, I felt glad and agreed with it.”
The delicate _Iris Tectorum_ would be an immense addition to our
English flower gardens, if only our summers were hot enough to bake
their roots sufficiently to make them flower. I succeeded in making
them grow; they threw up their shoots each year, but never one single
flower, until at last, disgusted, I condemned them, like so many other
treasures brought from foreign climes, as unsuited to our cold grey
skies. Late in May these irises will be in full bloom and forming a
purple spur on the top of the thatched straw roofs of the farmhouses;
they are generally planted in this way (hence their name), and
transform the roof ridge of many a peasant’s dwelling into the aspect
of a flower garden. Many different reasons are ascribed to their being
planted in this manner; some say the irises are planted to avert the
evil spirits, and there is a superstition that they are efficacious
in the prevention of disease. There is also a legend that during one
of the famines that devastated the land in olden days an order went
forth that all cultivated land was to be given up to the growing of
rice, but that the women of Japan, determined to save their iris roots,
from which their powder (so essential to the toilette of every young
Japanese lady) is made, planted them on the roofs of their houses. I
give the tale with all due reserve, as I was never able to verify it,
nor do I even know for certain that their precious _shiroi_ is made
from iris roots.
Other people no less positively affirm the growth to be accidental.
Others, again, assert that the object is to strengthen the thatch.
We incline to this latter view; bulbs do not fly through the air,
neither is it likely that bulbs should be contained in the sods
put on the top of _all_ the houses in a village. We have noticed,
furthermore, that in the absence of such sods, brackets of strong
shingling are employed, so that it is safe to assume that the two
are intended to serve the same purpose. (Chamberlain’s _Things
Japanese_.)
No matter the reason for their being so planted--be it for protection,
be it for the sake of vanity or merely for safety--the effect is none
the less charming, and later in the year these little roof gardens are
sometimes gay with _Hemerocallis aurantiaca_ or a stray tuft of scarlet
Nerine.
The true _Iris japonica_ or _chinensis_ is a shade-loving plant, with
many lavender-coloured flowers on a branching stem, each outer petal
marked with purple lines, and in the centre of the flower a deep orange
horn. Like so many delicately marked flowers, it has a very short life,
each individual bloom appearing to last only from one
[Illustration: IRISES]
sunrise to the next, but the stems bear so many blooms that other buds
quickly open and fill the gap of yesterday’s blossom.
_Iris gracilipes_ seems the commonest and most free-flowering of
all the irises. In May its graceful purple flowers and vivid green
grass-like foliage seemed to fringe each pond, and the only fault I had
to find with this form of iris was the short duration of its flowering
season; the plants bloom so freely they appeared to flower themselves
to death, and after one short week their slender heads would hide
themselves until the resurrection of the next “flower month.”.
I learnt that the _Iris lævigata_, which appears to be synonymous
with Kämpfer’s iris, is much used as a decoration for ceremonies and
congratulatory occasions, but on account of its purple colour it is
not desirable for weddings, though permissible for betrothals. It is
much honoured in the art of flower arrangement, and ranks high among
the flowers used for the vase on the _tokonoma_; and the leaves are
as much prized as the flowers, lending themselves to the bending and
twisting required to attain the regulation curves. As a rule it is
not permissible to use the leaves alone of a plant which may bear a
flower, or the flowerless branches of a shrub which may bear blossoms
or berries; but _Iris japonica_ seems an exception to this rule, and
the leaves alone may be used before the flowers appear. The first of
the ten artistic virtues attributed to certain special combinations is
headed in Mr. Conder’s list by _Simplicity_--expressed by rushes and
irises in a two-storey bamboo vase. The beautiful arrangement known as
_Rikkwa_ (double stump arrangement) consists of a combination of pine,
iris, and bamboo grass.