Tokio Flower Festivals
tsuziimi drums, their kimonos embroidered with cherry blossoms, hair-pins, and coronals of blossoms set in the butterfly loops of blue-black hair. Then the rain comes, the petals fall, and those snow storms not from the skies whiten the ground.
For a week in June, jinrikishas spin up this leafy tunnel to the iris fêtes at Hori Kiri, where in ponds and trenches grow acres of such fleur-de-lis as no Bourbon ever knew. Compared with the cherry-blossom carnival, this festival is a quiet and decorous garden party, where summer-houses, hills, lakes, armies of royal flowers, and groups of visitors seem to be consciously arranging themselves for decorative effects.
After the season opens, flower festivals crowd one another, and the miracles of Japanese floriculture presently exhaust the capacity of wonder. One of the most superb of their productions is the botan, or tree peony, whose fringed and silken flowers, as large as dinner-plates, show all delicate rose and lilac shades, a red that is almost black, and cream, pale yellow, straw color, and salmon hues of marvellous beauty. At the Ikegami temples, the Nichiren priests display with pride their botan, now three hundred years old, whose solid trunk and wrinkled bark uphold a multitude of stately blossoms. Azaleas, fire-red, snow-white, salmon-pink, and lilac, crowd every garden, and the mountains and wild river-banks are all ablaze with them in May.
Then, also, the wistaria, the fuji, is in bloom, and at the Kameido temple makes an eighth wonder of the world. Every householder has his wistaria trellis, generally reaching out as a canopy over some inlet, or, as at Kameido, forming the roofs of the open air tea-houses edging the lake. The mat of leaves and blossoms overhead casts thick, cool shadows, and the long, pendent purple and white flowers are reflected in the water. Blossoms two and even three feet long are common, and
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