Phlox suffruticosa

Twelve ways of seeing

• measured cast red
• upright 1.53 : 1
• published 1818
• Plate 48

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

   夫象物必在于形似，形似须全其骨气。

   —— 唐·张彦远《历代名画记》

   Likeness is the threshold; bone-and-breath is the point.

   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

   The binomial is Phlox suffruticosa: the first word is the genus it belongs among, the second the epithet that sets it apart. Two words carry a whole provenance. The Chinese name 花荵科 is a modern rendering of the Latin, not an old garden name.

3. 03

   Form and Colour

   Measured on this plate: flower colour covers 5.4% of the sheet, foliage 3.9%, the cast red. No other plate shares exactly this measure. Wildflowers are rarely tidy: small blooms, slender stems, leaves imperfect and often chewed. That untidiness is exactly what records wind, light and soil.No colour group is recorded. A single plant, laid out with nothing hidden.

4. 04

   Composition

   Tall and narrow, the plant rising in one movement with generous margins — the upright format of most floras. (about 1.53 : 1) No details are appended: a plate for looking, not for keying out. The plant covers only 10% of the sheet, centred above centre; the emptiness is where the eye rests. 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. Craft leaves franker evidence than inscriptions.

6. 06

   Season

   By latitude and altitude; in the northeastern United States, April to August — each species for two or three weeks, so a wildflower book is arranged by month. The year 1818 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

   Native plants of woodland floor, bog, roadside and rock crevice; they resent transplanting and will not mass in a border — the difference between a wildflower and a garden flower. The volume was made in 1818-1824, when most of this knowledge came from living plants under glass.

8. 08

   The Book and the Hand

   “Flora Italiana” was drawn by Gaetano Savi and published 1818-1824. This plate is Plate 48. The image is public domain; the hand-colouring is still one person's hand.

9. 09

   Poetic Resonance

   离离原上草，一岁一枯荣。野火烧不尽，春风吹又生。

   —— 唐·白居易《赋得古原草送别》

   Lush grass on the plain, once a year it withers and thrives; wildfire cannot burn it away — the spring wind blows and it grows again.

   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

    庭下如积水空明，水中藻荇交横，盖竹柏影也。

    —— 宋·苏轼《记承天寺夜游》

    The courtyard seemed flooded with clear water, weeds crossing in it — in fact the shadows of bamboo and cypress.

    The Book of Songs names more than 140 plants, most of them wild; Confucius said the Songs teach the names of birds, beasts and plants — natural history begins in the field. The difference is not of quality but of question: Europe asks what it is, China asks whom it resembles.

11. 11

    Symbolism

    In Chinese verse wildflowers bloom unseen, owing nothing to praise; in the West they mark a place — one species, one landscape's character. 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 1818.