He wrote of the lotus:
Growing out of the muddiest and most stagnant water, its leaves and flowers are always fresh and clean; although it is particularly sensitive, and quickly withers if brought into contact with any of the foul fertilizers by which other plants are nourished. This purity which the Lotus maintains amid surrounding filth, is mentioned as the reason for associating it with a religious life, and in a well-known book of Buddhist precepts, it is written:- ‘If thou be born in the poor man’s hovel, but hast wisdom, then art thou like the Lotus flower growing out of the mud!’
Of the lotuses Conder recommended for flower arranging, the sweetest and most powerfully scented was the white lotus, while the more handsome red had little scent, he said. Other varieties included a ‘Gold-thread-lotus’, its red blossoms marked with yellow lines; a fine deep-crimson variety; and sometimes the Indian lotus, whose large red blossoms never closed (ordinary lotus blossoms generally close around noon) but dropped off after five or six days. Almost as esteemed as the flowers, lotus leaves were selected according to Conder to represent the Buddhist divisions of time into past, present and future: past time signified by a partly decayed or worm-eaten leaf; present time by a handsome open leaf, also known as a ‘Mirror Leaf’; and future time by a leaf about to uncurl.
Not all Europeans viewed the changing lotus with such serenity. Visiting Japan in the early 1890s, the Victorian artist and garden designer Alfred Parsons found painting Japanese flowers extremely irksome as ‘the buds of yesterday are flowers to-day, and tomorrow nothing is left but the ruin of a past beauty’. Lotuses – which he spied first near the railway on his way to Tokyo – he found especially troublesome, branding them ‘one of the most difficult plants which it has ever been my lot to try and paint; the flowers are at their best only in the early morning, and each blossom after it has opened closes again before noon the first day, and on the second day its petals drop.’ The large glaucous leaves were no easier, reflecting every passing shade of the sky and being ‘so full of modelling that it is impossible to generalize them as a mass; each one has to be carefully studied, and every breath of wind disturbs their delicate balance, and completely alters their forms’.
Parsons had installed his easel by the lotus beds beside the little temple of Benten at Shiba (the Shinobazu pond in Ueno Park, Tokyo), where he was jostled from morning to night by curious onlookers, mostly children with babies tied to their backs. Despite the best efforts of a patrolling policeman to disperse the crowd, their ranks were quickly refilled. ‘The spectators are almost always polite,’ remarked Parsons, ‘and take care not to put themselves between you and your subject; but they squeeze up very close to your elbow, and trample on your nerves, if not on your materials.’
Although adopted by the Buddhists, said Parsons, the lotus ex cited no animosity among the followers of Shinto, and lotus ponds were left unscathed when Buddhist shrines were pulled down. The largest ponds he saw were connected to the great Hachiman shrine at Kamakura, where white, bright-rose and shell-pink lotuses grew freely. The white lotus was particularly favoured by adherents of Nichiren, ‘a noisy sect which beats a drum during the long hours of prayer’; the same variety was also grown in rice fields as a food crop. They tasted of very little, except of the sugar with which they were boiled, ‘but they are crisp in texture and pleasant to munch’. The seed-heads, which Theophrastus had compared to a Thessalian hat, Parsons described as ‘very like the rose of a watering pot’.
While Parsons remained ambivalent about the lotus, associating its evident beauty with the discomforts of a Japanese summer, other western writers and artists welcomed the lotus as a way of projecting the exotic ‘otherness’ of Japan. The fashion for all things Japanese, fanned in Britain by the American-born artist James McNeill Whistler, lured to Japan a select band of western visitors, among them the ‘Glasgow Boy’ painters, George Henry and his friend Edward Atkinson Hornel. In The Lotus Flower, painted in 1894, Hornel brings huge pink and white lotuses to the foreground while above them floats a gorgeously dressed oiran or courtesan having her hair arranged in traditional style. Hornel surely intended such a head-on collision between an exotic contemporary sensuality and Buddhism’s sacred flower.
The soft ‘but rather cloying’ scent of late lotus blossoms also pervades the final pages of Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysanthème, which lent its oriental atmosphere and part of its plot to Puccini’s opera, Madame Butterfly. Widely read in its day, Madame Chrysanthème is tainted for today’s readers by the cultural arrogance of its hero, a ‘superior’ foreigner who acquires a mousmé or temporary wife in a purely commercial transaction. Often irritated by her, he nonetheless admires her Japanese flower arrangements and especially her lotus flowers, ‘great sacred flowers of a tender, veined rose-colour, the milky rose-colour seen on porcelain; they resemble, when in full bloom, great water-lilies, and when only in bud, might be taken for long pale tulips’. As he prepares to leave Japan, he gives a farewell tea party at which the burning lamps and the damp breath of the mousmés bring out the perfume of the lotus, which blends in the heavy-laden atmosphere with the camellia oil the women use in their hair; and as his ship sails away from Nagasaki, he throws his last, faded lotus blooms into the sea, making his ‘best excuses for giving to them, natives of Japan, a grave so solemn and so vast’.
THE LOTUS IN late nineteenth-century art and literature demonstrates how flowers can accrue meanings that turn them into metaphors. The exotic lure of the East is one such lotus abstraction. Another is the connection between lotuses and dreams, an idea already present in the ‘lotos’ of the ancient Greeks, a name given by Theophrastus to at least six different plants: the two Nile water-lily lotuses (Nymphaea caerulea and N. lotus); the Lote or Nettle tree of the Mediterranean (Celtis australis); a perennial clover (Trifolium fragiferum); fenugreek (Trigonella foenum-graecum); and North African jujube (Ziziphus lotus). This last is traditionally assumed to bear the mesmeric fruit that Odysseus encountered on the island of the Lotophagoi as he made his way home from Troy. As sweet as dates and the size of a lentisk-berry, according to Herodotus, the fruit of this lotus could be made into a wildly intoxicating wine; in Homer, any crewman who ate the ‘honey-sweet fruit’ lost all desire to return home,
their only wish to linger there with the Lotus-eaters, grazing on lotus, all memory of the journey home dissolved forever.
Although this strange North African fruit bears no botanical relation to either ancient Egypt’s Nile water lilies or the sacred lotuses of the East, its ‘languor and honeyed bliss’ have infected the lotus story, reappearing virtually unchanged some two and a half millennia later in the drowsy rhythms of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem, The Lotos-Eaters, where
The Lotos blooms below the barren peak;
The Lotos blows by every winding creek.
Other flowers contribute to Tennyson’s enchanted atmosphere: the myrrh bush (probably a kind of acacia), amaranth, moly, acanthus, poppy and beds of asphodel, and in the opening verse of the choral incantation:
There is sweet music here that softer falls
Than petals from blown roses on the grass.
But the lotus is the flower that lingers in the memory.
The same drowsily decadent lotus resurfaced in the French poet Charles Baudelaire’s ‘Le Voyage’, which closed the second edition of Les Fleurs du Mal published in 1861. Now, however, the traveller will almost certainly eat the perfumed lotus, these ‘miraculous fruits for which your heart hungers’, and thus succumb to the ‘strange gentleness of this afternoon which shall never end’. Only by drinking death’s poison can the traveller plumb the depths of the abyss, reaching beyond the unknown to encounter the new.
Such finality infuses John William Waterhouse’s dreamily bewitching painting Hylas and the Nymphs, which captures the moment when the Argonaut Hylas falls for the imploring eyes and gentle caresses of the Naiades as they lure him into their watery abode, tangled with sinuous water lilies. They are worlds apart fro
m the serene, sunlit water lilies that Claude Monet painted in his water garden at Giverny, when his eyesight was fading. After a lifetime of trying to capture atmosphere filtered through light, he was now trying to capture light filtered through water, which presented an even greater challenge; his lilies appear to float on clouds reflected in the surface of this ‘trick mirror’.
The Indian lotus has left a fainter impression in western art and poetry than either water lilies or Japanese lotuses, but one that lingers nonetheless. Particularly memorable are Howard Hodgkin’s watercolour lotuses dating from the 1980s when he stayed as a guest of the Sarabai family, mill owners from Ahmedabad, living in a small white bungalow at the centre of their Douanier Rousseau garden. Long fascinated by Indian art, Hodgkin painted the everyday sights around him: a concrete wall with a flower garland hanging from it; vistas of horizon and sky; a train crossing a distant landscape. Occasionally his hosts would eye him through the bungalow windows, ‘rather like eighteenth-century gentry in England would look at their pet hermit’. In Hodgkin’s own arrangement of his watercolours, he placed the larger lotus last in the sequence, an image of ‘fulfilment or perfect pleasure when all struggle is ended’.
A similar ‘lotos’ arises from the once-dry pool in ‘Burnt Norton’, the opening poem of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, its flower rising quietly from roots embedded in the slime and breaking through the surface of the water to attain enlightenment. Thus does the American-born poet bring the eastern lotus into a poem redolent of western roses, and half-rembered moments in the rose-garden where time stops still.
TODAY, YOU CAN order the tropical blue Nile water lily Nymphaea caerulea from specialist growers, including Latour-Marliac in France, who supplied Monet with his water lilies and whose recent catalogues boast nine Nelumbium in white, red, pink and rosy lilac. Many more true lotuses are available in Japan, some 300 at least, of which two-thirds are preserved at the University of Tokyo’s Experimental Station for Landscape Plants. To see the Nile water lilies in flower, you will almost certainly have to visit a botanical garden with a tropical water-lily house, but many gardens in warmer regions of the United States can show you fine beds of the sacred lotus, Nelumbo nucifera: at California’s Huntington Botanical Gardens, for instance, where the lotuses bloom from mid-July; and at Walter and Marion Beck’s Innisfree Garden in the Hudson Valley, where my lotus quest began.
Like Eliot, the Becks brought eastern ideas into a western setting, inspired by references to a Chinese garden created in the eighth century by the poet, painter and garden-maker Wang Wei, which they discovered on a research visit to London. As interpreted by Walter Beck, Wang Wei sculpted his country estate in a series of ‘cups’ or three-dimensional pictures, centred on a large lake with gently enclosing hills. Innisfree’s original lotus pool, planted in 1945 with white varieties of lotus, has since been abandoned and a new pool excavated east of Tiptoe Rock. Now lotuses are part of the large bog garden that begins in the meadow and moves ever northwards, while white and pink lotuses creep into the lake, appearing in midsummer and flowering for a month or more.
Their appeal is timeless. Nearly thirteen centuries ago, Wang Wei wrote about the lotus in a series of poems inspired by his country retreat:
A light boat greets the arriving guest,
Coming over the lake from far away,
Across the gallery we raise our cups;
On every side the lotus is in bloom.
Innisfree’s lotuses take me back to the abstracted lotuses of Samye Ling, the Tibetan monastery in a gentle Scottish valley where the lotus mantra and its intimations of other realities once formed part of my everyday habits. As simile, metaphor, idea, fragrance, garden flower, medicine or simply as food, the lotus finds echoes in all the other stories that follow but the lotus is – for this writer at least – where the power of flowers began.
2
Lily
I see a lily on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.
JOHN KEATS, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’
6. White lily from John Gerard, The Herball or General Historie of Plantes, 1597 (Image provided by Peter H. Raven Library, Missouri Botanical Garden, http://www.missouribotanicalgarden.org/)
THE WHITE MADONNA lily (Lilium candidum) is Europe’s answer to the lotus. Grown in gardens for more than 3,500 years, it surpassed even the all-powerful King Solomon in its ‘beauty and braverie’. So wrote the Elizabethan herbalist John Gerard, doubtless seduced by the white lily’s association with the Virgin Mary, which turned it into one of Christendom’s most potent symbols. But the lily’s sacred associations stretch back far beyond biblical times, to the Minoans of Crete and the eastern Mediterranean, who painted its earthly and symbolic beauty onto their walls and artefacts, leaving us strange hints of its potency, even then.
Gardeners today are far more likely to plant the larger, showier Asiatic species and hybrids, so when you chance upon a bed of Madonna lilies, their white flower clusters appear smaller than you might imagine, the flower trumpets not so pronounced. I have never grown them myself, although lilies were among the very few flowers I allowed into the urban jungle of my first garden: white Regal lilies (Lilium regale), introduced into Europe by Ernest ‘Chinese’ Wilson. I loved them for their ethereal night-time fragrance and for their fleeting reference to Rimbaud, one of my flawed heroes, who slipped shivery white lilies into the surreal and scurrilous verses he dedicated to the Parnassian poet, Théodore de Banville, ‘What one says to the poet on the subject of flowers’. (He also included roses, a blue lotus and a sunflower, among many others.)
In common with all the flowers in this book, the lily has a complex and contrary history. Adopted as the badge of Mary’s purity, it gradually ceded ground to the rose in Christian iconography, just as the garden lily lost out to American and Asiatic varieties, reinventing itself eventually as the languid flower of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art movements, which elevated art to the status of religion. In the West, the white lily Lilium longiflorum from southern Japan and Taiwan is celebrated as the flower of funerals and of Easter, while the great British plantswoman Gertrude Jekyll so cherished the Asiatic Tiger lily (L. lancifolium) that she looked on it as an old English native. Flowers are forever crossing boundaries of one kind or an other, as the lily’s story so clearly shows.
UNLIKE THE ROSE, which took centuries – millennia, even – to evolve into a garden beauty, the lily sprang fully formed into the public eye. First to record its beauty were the Bronze-Age Minoans of Crete and Thera (Santorini) in the eastern Mediterranean, whose civilization came to a catastrophic end around the middle of the second millennium BCE. Among the mementos they left behind are some spectacular lily frescoes found in the Cretan palace complex of Knossos and its eastern port of Amnisos. Cruder perhaps but equally full of life and charm, the lily paintings of Thera confirm the Minoans’ delight in this most fragrant of cultivated flowers, which joined the saffron crocus in the pantheon of flowers the Minoans revered most.
Crete’s painted lilies owe their discovery to the wealthy British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans, who bought the entire archaeological site of Knossos in 1900 and whose invasive excavations and ‘restorations’ have laid false trails ever since. One fresco irreparably damaged by his excavations showed a fine group of white lilies with orange anthers and green foliage against a dark red background, dated at between 1700 and 1600 BCE. In a naturalistic touch, the petals of one of the flowers had become detached as if by the passing breeze, a detail that went far beyond ‘mere decorative art’ in Evans’s view, which he likened to a Minoan seal of about the same time showing trees swayed by the wind.
More formal in a garden sense are the frescoes from the ‘House of the Lilies’ at Amnisos, in which tall, white-petalled lilies bearing a dozen flowers each stand before a stepped frieze – a garden wall, perhaps. They look like Lilium candidum, wh
ich may once have grown wild in the vicinity, although the garden variety is typically sterile and the type is usually assumed to have originated further east. Another townhouse fresco from Amnisos portrays clusters of tall lilies growing beside a formal garden feature, which reminded Evans of the fountains at Versailles; and he naturally enthused about the many lily decorations found on Minoan vases, jugs, and another naturalistic wall painting found at the little palace of Hagia Triada in south-central Crete.
Beloved in gardens and as ornament, the lily also appears to have played a more obviously sacramental role in Minoan iconography, at least if we accept the evidence of one of Evans’s most trumpeted finds at Knossos. This is a painted relief he dubbed the ‘Priest-King’, discovered among the rubble of a ceremonial corridor abutting the Central Court and ‘restored’ by Émile Gilliéron fils, one of a pair of Swiss artists, father and son, who helped Evans with his reconstructions. While not exactly forgers, the Gilliérons executed brash and overconfident reconstructions from the flimsiest of evidence, frequently obliterating the very fragments they sought to conserve.
In Gilliéron’s reconstructed scene, a muscular young man strides through a field of stylized lilies (Evans identified them as irises), wearing nothing but a loincloth, a plumed lily crown and a red lily collar. Thrusting his right shoulder forwards, the youth appears to be leading an animal, which Evans interpreted as a sacred griffin. Here, said Evans, with breathless assurance, was the earthly representative and adopted son of the Minoan mother goddess, ‘a Priest-King after the order of Minos’ and nothing less than ‘Minos himself in one of his mortal incarnations’.
Seven Flowers Page 4