Hærdaceous Pæony. (1896)
Hærdaceous Pæony,
About this plate
Hærdaceous Pæony. (1896) is plate 24, from Some Japanese Flowers, drawn by Kazumasa Ogawa. This public-domain plate is reproduced at high resolution, free to view and download. Publication: Tokyo, 1896.
Twelve ways of seeing
One plate, read twelve times over: its name, its colour, the burin and the brush, the shape of the sheet, the season, the soil it came from, the book it belongs to, its language of flowers, the poem it answers to, the lore behind it, how to look, and what remains.
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The Name
The plate is titled “Hærdaceous Pæony.”, numbered Plate 24. No reliable binomial survives on the plate, so it must be cited by its original title. Neither a Chinese name nor a reliable binomial survives: the plate can only be cited by its printed title, and left to speak for itself.
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Form and Colour
A botanical plate: one plant lifted from field or glasshouse and set at the centre of the sheet, root, stem, leaf, flower and fruit in turn, made legible, citable, transmissible. Filed under orange — an amber orange. The colour is built in washes: a pale ground first, then deepening at the petal base and in shadow. Three things fix the habit: leaf arrangement, tepal count, and how the flower is borne.
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Line and Colour
In the later nineteenth century chromolithography took over: colour printed rather than painted, line demoted. Images grew more accurate and less personal. Look closely at the line and the colour: an unbroken line means engraving, colour crossing the outline by half a millimetre means hand-colouring. Craft leaves franker evidence than inscriptions.
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Composition
Slightly taller than wide, the plant set a little above centre so the eye lands on the flower. (about 1.27 : 1). No details are appended: this is a plate for looking, not for keying out.
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Season
Plates usually record flowering, the fortnight when a plant is most identifiable; the rest of the year it is only a mass of leaves. The year 1896 on the plate is the year of publication, not of flowering — the gathering came a year or two earlier.
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Provenance
Various: local hillside or a plant brought from overseas. The nineteenth-century botanic garden and glasshouse were their first address away from home. The localities on the plate are those of a century ago; plants travel and places change their names.
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The Book
“Some Japanese Flowers” was drawn by Kazumasa Ogawa and published 1896. This plate is Plate 24. The image is in the public domain; the hand-colouring on the paper is still one person's hand, two centuries ago.
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Symbolism
The symbolism of such a plate lies not in flower lore but in record: the belief that a plant deserves to be drawn accurately — the plainest ethic of the scientific age. This plate leans orange, which in flower language adds one more degree of feeling. Flower language was added later; the flower knows nothing of it, and that innocence is part of its power.
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Poetic Resonance
天地有大美而不言，四时有明法而不议。
—— 《庄子·知北游》
Heaven and earth have great beauty and do not speak.
The poem gives the mood first and the picture supplies the form; set the line beside the plate and the orange the corolla becomes its resting point.
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Classical Lore
China had the Bencao Gangmu and the Illustrated Study of Plant Names and Realities; Europe moved from herbal woodcuts to chromolithography. Both trusted pictures to finish what words could not. Chinese flower books ranked plants by character; European floras described them by form and name. This plate belongs to the second tradition, yet bears reading by the first. Books fill in what the picture omits, and also hide what it shows: look first, read after.
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How to Look
Look at the edge: where the plant is cropped tells you how it was seen — as specimen, as garden plant, or as wild thing. Finally, the edge of the sheet: where the plant is cropped tells you how it was seen — specimen, garden plant, or wild thing.
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Afterword
A flora exists to be consulted; look long enough and you forget to consult — someone in 1896 gave a whole day to a single flower.
