Rose-coloured Pereskia

Twelve ways of seeing

• measured cast red
• upright 1.58 : 1
• published 1829
• Plate 930

Not a catalogue entry but a way of looking: how to stand, what to notice, how the line was cut, when it flowers, where it came from, who made it — and then the poems and the classics that taught China to see the same flower. Read the twelve in order and the plate opens.

1. 01

   First Look

   六法者何？一、气韵生动是也；二、骨法用笔是也；三、应物象形是也；四、随类赋彩是也；五、经营位置是也；六、传移模写是也。

   —— 南齐·谢赫《古画品录》

   The six laws: spirit resonance alive; bone-method in the brush; matching form; colour by kind; planning the placing; copying the masters.

   The sheet is vertical: the eye climbs and settles in the upper half. Let the plant stand before you look for detail. Then step in close: watch where colour meets line, and whether the line ever breaks. Third, find the darkest small patch: the whole tonal order is measured from there.

2. 02

   Name and Thing

   No reliable binomial survives, so the printed title must serve. Neither name nor binomial survives: the printed title must do.

3. 03

   Form and Colour

   Measured on this plate: flower colour covers 6.3% of the sheet, foliage 10.4%, the cast red with a second note of crimson. No other plate shares exactly this measure. Roses are shrubs or scramblers with pinnate leaves of three to seven serrated leaflets; the double flowers open in crumpled, inward-curling layers around a small knot of yellow stamens.No colour group is recorded. Read the outline, then the colour layers, then the brush.

4. 04

   Composition

   Tall and narrow, the plant rising in one movement with generous margins — the upright format of most floras. (about 1.58 : 1) No details are appended: a plate for looking, not for keying out. The plant fills 46% of the sheet, centred near the centre — the herbarium way, drawn to be read whole. Cover the margins with your thumb and the plate suffocates; uncover them and the flower breathes again.

5. 05

   Line and Colour

   The first half of the nineteenth century moved from copper to steel to lithography; stipple could render the softest transition. There is evidence on the back too: the plate mark pressed into the paper, the slight relief of the pigment, lines worn shallow in a later printing.

6. 06

   Season

   Late spring into early summer, peaking in May — the first flush of the garden year. The year 1829 on the plate is that of publication, not of flowering — the gathering came a year or two earlier. The best time to read such a plate is its flowering season: three minutes under the tree explains what no text can.

7. 07

   Provenance

   Widespread in the temperate north. Chinese gardeners knew roses since the Han; the ever-blooming modern rose is a nineteenth-century crossing of European and Chinese stock. The volume was made in 1829-1847, when most of this knowledge came from living plants under glass.

8. 08

   The Book and the Hand

   “Edwards' Botanical Register” was drawn by Sydenham Edwards, John Lindley and published 1829-1847. This plate is Plate 930. The image is public domain; the hand-colouring is still one person's hand.

9. 09

   Poetic Resonance

   芙蓉浪中蔷薇水，苏合蜣蜋忘彼己。

   —— 宋·文天祥《赠拆字嗅衣相士》

   The poem gives the mood first and the picture supplies the form; set the line beside the plate and the corolla becomes its resting point.

10. 10

    The Written Tradition

    插花不可太繁，亦不可太瘦。多不过二种三种，高低疏密，如画苑布置方妙。

    —— 明·袁宏道《瓶史·宜称》

    Flowers should be set neither too crowded nor too sparse — two or three kinds at most, tall and low, dense and open, arranged as a painter would compose.

    Tradition places roses in the Han imperial park; Song and Ming manuals named the double forms 'Baoxiang' and 'Ten Sisters', and Qing compendia separated rose, rugosa and monthly rose. The difference is not of quality but of question: Europe asks what it is, China asks whom it resembles.

11. 11

    Symbolism

    In Europe the rose means love and secrecy ('sub rosa'); in Chinese verse the rambling rose leans and clings — lingering attachment rather than ardour. Flower language was added later; the flower knows nothing of it, and that innocence is part of its power.

12. 12

    What to Take Away

    Appreciation is not knowledge but habit — one more look each time. Two centuries on, the plant may still flower in some garden; the one on this sheet stopped in the season of 1829.