delicately fashioned, pure white blossoms, I hesitate still more. And the exquisite bean-blossom fragrance of them!
Never was a falser statement made than that the flowers of Japan have no fragrance. All the species that have perfume in other countries are even sweeter here. Wistaria, Azalea, all the many Lilies are rich in delicious scent, while Plum and Cherry, wild Apple and Peach have something more than the sweet pungent odour they offer in other lands. Magnolias, in Kyoto, have the mystic fragrance, half religious, half sensual, that they have in Virginia. Woods, banks, and hill-sides in Japan are often as heavily sweet as Easter churches at home.
Of the last named, April’s flower and May’s, Sir Francis Piggott has a pretty simile: “Magnolia trees, leafless as yet, with blossoms standing up like great candles which seem to make the daylight linger and live longer in the night.”
In May, or April in the South, in Wistaria-time, comes also the Pæony, the small sort, cultivated in pots. This is one of the various China-New-Year flowers in Hong-Kong, but it was too flauntingly Chinese to appeal to me very much (although its pink and white and deep red blooms are as splendid as befits the ‘Rich Man’s Flower’), until Mr. Tyndale’s poetic presentation of it (see page 234) put it in its transformed light as a Japanese flower.
