A highlight of a recent invitational tour of Sakai City near Osaka was our group’s three-hour immersion in what was billed as the Japanese Garden in Daisen Park.
Spread out over a modest 2.6 hectares, it’s one of those well-manicured gardens with wide concrete paths that meander through sections featuring combinations of plant specimens, running pebbly brooks with arching wooden bridges, Chinese-style pagodas in humble acknowledgment of that influence, rest pavilions where guests can view the pleasant greenscape, and a lagoon with the usual koi that one can feed.
The first attraction upon entry is an old (I surmise about 30-40 years) podocarpus whose leaf clusters on lateral branches are regularly pruned to create dramatic twisting shapes. No, it’s not exactly topiary, where prune-able small trees or bushes are made to represent animal shapes. Pruning a podocarpus just creates bulbous or ovoid shapes set apart from one another.
In this garden, it also provides a hands-on opportunity for guests. An hour is scheduled for participatory tree-cutting, as it’s billed. One of the official gardeners, clad in a hapi or short cotton robe with official signage in kanji, props up a metal ladder against the tree and clips away with shears.
Then guests with photo-op interests are lent similar blue-colored hapi, handed the shears, and helped up the ladder to clip away safely, or simulate the exercise while grinning at their own cameras handled by someone on the ground.
When a fellow tourist asked what the tree was called, and got a reply in Japanese, I couldn’t help but pipe in: “Podocarpus.” Our translator overheard it, and asked me again. The rest of the group took my word for it, jotting it down after making me spell it out — especially after I explained that I had one such specimen in my old front garden, thus knew its name.
Oh yes, I miss that podocarpus, planted in 1993, thus now nearing its 20th year on earth. I had been pruning it, too, as far as I could reach. Now it must be 20 feet high or something, especially since its top isn’t being regularly lopped off. It still stands by the façade of an earlier domicile I occupied till five years ago. Why, that means I had cared for, and occasionally pruned, that podocarp for about 14 years!
I like knowing the names of plants just as much as I do with stars. A poem titled “Knowing,” dated May 2007, partly goes:
“He knew his plants, his stars,/ their names.// Figures of memory/ escaped him — light years/ bridging distance,/ degrees of scintillation,/ ecliptics/ in avoidance of meteors./ Or: variants and hybrids.// But he knew what they ought to be called,/ their identities beyond cluster or grove.// Sometimes, never mind the Latin./ What was essential was visible to the tongue/ when pointing out a particular, not just there/ but that one, that blue-pea vine with flowers/…” Etcetera.
Skip a stanza or two, thence:
“It was important, to himself he claimed,/ to know the names of things./ To call a philtrum such,/ when you scratched below your nosetip,/ a lawrence when you saw one shimmering/ ahead on that dry asphalt road in summer.//…”
Again, skip two stanzas. Ends thus:
“Making acquaintance of a restaurant, it depends/ on the region, in the shadow of which volcano,/ whether the shellfish served/ are called this or that,/ the coconut part grated or drained,/ before that kind/ or this kind of chili or cayenne is minced or julienned.// It helps to know all their names.”
Yes, and I would like someday to be able to cross through a botanical garden, say in Singapore, or the one in Sydney, maybe with a toddler of a grandson, and point out at least half of the plants around and identify them, and have him repeat after me, say, “Morning Glory.”
And I’d deem it unnecessary to tell him, yet, since he’s only three or four, that that’s but the common name for “over 1,000 species of flowering plants in the family Convolvulaceae, whose current taxonomy and systematics are in flux…”
Well, he might like trying to say “Convolvulaceae,” and we’d wind up har-har-ing so hard we’d tumble down on the grass, some kind of grass, and wind up hugging, har-de-har-haring, bonding.
Anyway, getting back to that garden a fortnight ago, I managed to ask the head gardener, through an interpreter, if I could have seeds of the Morning Glory genera they had growing on small pots, the vines crawling up thin bamboo sticks arranged in a circle. He kept nodding initially. But the interpreter asked me in turn: Would I be allowed to carry ’em home? No prob, I assured ’em, I knew all about quarantine processes, that it’ll probably cost me half an hour to fill up papers and show the seeds, seedlings, cuttings, whatever. Which meant that I knew enough to just place everything in my check-in luggage, no harm no foul.
And that’s how I wound up with seeds of two kinds of Japanese Garden-bred Morning Glory, which the amiable gardener neatly wrapped up in paper, and marked: “Kikyou-Zaki (Red)” and “Kikyou-Zaki (Purple).”
When I got home, I could only find the “Purple”-marked paper packet; the other one got mixed up with sundry papers, and which I uncovered much later. As I write this, the purple Morning Glory seeds have sprouted in a pot and are now two inches high. I should sow the Red variety during this typhoon, expect all the positive ions in the air to give the seeds a boost.
In other pots, other seeds are sprouting. I plucked off dried seedpods from at least half-a-dozen other kinds of plants in our walking tours of Sakai: what looked like pink gumamela or hibiscus right outside a Zen Buddhist temple, large round camellia seeds from the garden of the Yamaguchi residential landmark that dates back to 1615, plus others picked up from the ground where such trees and shrubs and bushes grew, from the campus of the Kyoto University to roadside gardens.
Trouble is, I’m not much of a proper classifier, so that apart from the purple Morning Glory and the camellia (and I’ve since read up that Japanese camellia are the best in the world!), I wouldn’t be able to tell what those seedlings will grow up to be, ha-ha.
I also purchased a small pot of flowering pink cyclamen and a medium-sized plastic pot with a kind of elegant cypress that’s about a foot-and-a half tall. And now these lovely additions to my garden are standing on the edge of our front yard where morning sun lavishes its bounty.
It’s one of the perks of travel, bringing home species familiar or un-. Cosmos seeds from Tehran and Shiraz (by a poet’s mausoleum) sprouted and grew and flowered early this year, in pots, but inexplicably died out, maybe because snails got to them or I was out for over a week and they weren’t watered properly, so I never got to replant them directly on the ground.
I take much comfort in caring for these silent little things, that sometimes grow into big things, still silently, prettily. Gardens and poetry go together, I think. There’s something similar in the ways one crafts eventual delights that perk you up in the morning or wafts so fragrant at night.
It’s why I wasn’t surprised that upon FB-posting a pic I took of flowering cadena de amor on our backyard wall, hours later the image was reposted as an enhanced version, with the following poem by my buddy Marne Kilates super-imposed on the original image.
Here’s his “Ghazal of the Cadena de Amor”:
“We came loose from our moorings, sailed oceans of air./ The earth was flat, over the brink we fell into air.// What wily sirens lured our vagabond art, broke/ Our shackles of the heart, freed us from native scent of air?//Daraga, my town under the Volcano, named after maiden/ Or tree, you dwell in my memory of air.// From earthen jars we drank the burnt-sweet water/ The Volcano shed in springs, chilled in air.// Dew or nectar, it caught in petals of the lowly flowers,/ Wild vine that chained our hearts to familiar air.// Manila, my city: your scent of soot and oil/ Melts what shackles I have left; I breathe your foul air.// Gray the color of squalor, green of vined hills/ I cannot dispel: sprinkled with the pink spray of air.// Beyond the jagged, gleaming horizon, my Volcano lurks,/ Sulking ghost, red mouth glowing in the sharp air.// Glaring, it scolds the unshackling of my Love:/ I flounder unmoored, I want for air.”
From Marne’s notes, this poem was first dated October 18, 2002, and revised on May 8, 2012. And that it’s included in the cycle of poems he calls “‘Monsoon Ghazals’ (mainly about flowers in my hometown and ‘native’ to my memory), newly ‘refurbished’ and augmented…” They’re now part of his latest poetry collection, Lyrical Objects (UST Press, 2013).
Buy a copy. Grow his poems. Tend to your garden. Be lyrical. And live with loveliness.