This morning, I went to Kew Gardens - my favourite place on Earth - “to see the cherry hung with snow”. I was probably a week or ten days too late to catch the first fragile yet exuberant burst of blossom, but even I find it hard to appreciate the glory of these trees when it’s freezing cold and raining.Today, the sun was shining from a cloudless sky and there was an invigorating breeze to take the edge off the heat. In fact, perfect blossom- viewing weather. In Japan, of course, blossom worship is an annual communal event: a blossom forecast follows the nightly weather on japanese TV during the blossom season - January-April - to allow viewers to plan their outings with family and friends to celebrate the glorious outburst of sublimely beautiful white and pink clouds tinged with green.
Over here, we don’t on the whole take it quite that seriously - but I reckon the Japanese have got it right (they supposedly imported the custom from China some 1200 years ago). The effect of hundreds of thousands of tiny, delicate white or pink blossoms shivering bravely against a background of dark branches below a sharp blue sky is indescribably poignant yet cheering. Their transitoriness, their fragility, make each viewing a concentrated experience - blink, and it’s gone.Housman expressed it well in that perennial favourite, “Loveliest of Trees”:
LOVELIEST of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
(To hear the poem, go to the Classic Poetry Aloud website and click the “Play” button next to the title.)
As for musical celebrations of sakura (“cherry blossom” in Japanese), there’s this rather appealing Japanese folk song, with some lovely pictures to accompany it.
While the first flush of blossom is coming to an end in London, there will be a continuous succession of flowerings for the next month or so as different types of trees burst into flower - including apple, pear and almond - and, of course, different varieties of cherry tree bloom at different times. Kew is worth returning to on a weekly basis during this period as, of course, it has a huge variety of blossom trees. My favourite of all is a single crabapple tree, the Purpurea Eleyi, which absolutely throbs with psychedelic colour in mid-May. It is heart-stoppingly beautiful: perhaps made even more so by the fact that its signals that the blossom season is just about over for another year.
Growing up as sensible people do, people who have won the lottery of life, in a country which believes cherry blossom is a type of shoe polish, it must be admitted that Mr Gronmark's choice, and Mr Housman's, is a surprising one for their favourite tree.
ReplyDeleteBlossom, mutability, yes, poignant, but lots of trees have blossom. Apple trees, for example, and you can make the most extraordinary green glazes from the ash of an apple tree. You can't do a damn thing with cherry ash. And you get apples from apple trees. Most cherry trees in this country are decorative only.
Every few years, I climb our cherry tree to prune it and shape it and I get filthy. Let me tell you, under that vulgarly blousy make-up, this is a dirty tree that doesn't look after its underwear.
The wood cuts easily, which is a good thing, but it burns like paper, it's pointless, and there's no scent from it.
At least you can do things with an oak. Build a battleship, for example, and rule the waves. Even pine has its uses. You can put tongue and groove all over your chimney breast. But a cherry tree? No. Try making a walking stick out of a cherry branch. Or even a washing line pole. Ha!
You want a favourite tree? Take another look at the hawthorn. That's a man's tree. It wuthers. It grows in all directions, untidy like an adolescent's bedroom, but strong and permanent (what's so special about mutability, why not celebrate massive permanence?). The hawthorn puts up a fight when I prune it. I spend months after the event extracting bits of thorn that got through the suit of armour I wear for the job, apparently pointlessly. It's murder to cut the wood and it burns for hours with the subtlest of scents.
And blossom? Give it a month and you'll see the hawthorn bloom, quietly, with small flowers, of deepest red, almost purple, late in the season, the winner, the survivor, understated and dignified as befits the most confident tree. None of your showy cherry blossom, that's just a toy, the hawthorn is the real thing.
But the big difference? The birds. They congregate in their hundreds in the hawthorn. Massed, for important conferences, policy-making decisions. You can't hold a parliament in a cherry tree. No self-respecting bird would accept the invitation. But they all attend the hawthorn, and even try to defend it when it comes to pruning. It's the birds' favourite, not just mine, and that clinches it.
Saturday, April 10, 2010 - 04:02 PM
As I was riding home on my bike on Saturday along the main blossom road in our area in bright sunshine, sudden winds drove waves of blossom along the street towards me and I found myself riding through a veritable blizzard of the stuff. It was a sublime moment - only blossom trees can do this, so I don't really care if they're dirty, scentless and unwelcoming to birds: they're about sheer, extravagant, overwhelming beauty. (But I agree - hawthorn is excellent.)
ReplyDeleteMonday, April 12, 2010 - 02:51 PM