Flowers as an Art Form

So a question I have gotten a lot is, how did someone like me, who grew up in New York City, get interested in plants of all things? The answer, which I am almost abashed to admit, is that I got into plants through a drama. Or rather, I suppose it would be more apt to say that my curiosity was peaked. If you must know, it was a Taiwanese drama called 下一站，幸福 or Autumn's Concerto in English. Now this is not a drama about plants, but one of the characters is a gardener and at one point he made a comment about the symbolic meaning behind a daisy, which got me curious enough to look it up. What I found was this really cool Victorian-era means of communication known as the Language of Flowers, as well as its Japanese counterpart, 花言葉 (Hanakotoba) both of which, as you might have guessed, appoint symbolic meanings to flowers, which people then used as a means of communication. Actually I might have briefly introduced this in a previous post of mine, come to think of it. In any case, this led to an interest in plants beyond just their symbolic meaning and here I am today.

Anyways, so why am I mentioning this? Well besides 花言葉, the Japanese also had 生け花 (Ikebana), which was the art of flower arranging, which I saw a bit of during my time in Taiwan.

國立中正紀念堂 (Guólì zhōngzhèng jìniàn táng)
國立中正紀念堂 (Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall) in Taipei was quite a lovely place.

What a lovely view!

The cool thing about the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall was that the outside was a botanical garden!

 But that is not what I want to focus on. There were a lot of different halls and exhibits within the actual building which was pretty large. One of these exhibits featured

(Unfortunately it was during this trip that my phone decided to mess with me, so the dimensions of the pictures are quite small, so I was not able to zoom in to read the names of the plants used in these pieces. Darn phone.)

I was not sure if this exhibit had anything to do with Chiang Kai-shek--perhaps this exhibit was in his honor, maybe he really liked flowers--but I was quite taken with these 插花作品--these flower arrangements--which utilized many different varieties of flowers alongside other objects such as, in the picture above, logs, sometimes baskets, some had water pools, some were larger, some more contained. These arrangements really called to mind ikebana, 花道 in Chinese, which would have been unsurprising as Taiwan was once a colony under Japan.

The base is actually water-filled

Another piece which had water

This was a larger scale work which stood on the floor and reached up quite high

Basket

I'm pretty sure that real flowers were used for these pieces, which is pretty amazing. I love the variation within each piece, not just in terms of flower types, but in terms of color and shape as well, all serving to complement each other. Contrary to popular belief, ikebana is more than just arranging flowers in a vase; a lot of it has to do with shape, line, and form, and focuses on more than just the floral part of a plant, but also its leaves and stem as well, which I think have been captured very well in these pieces. I definitely recommend looking at an ikebana exhibit if you get the chance to.

Until next time~

Taipei: The City as a Botanical Garden

Apparently I missed blogging so much that I feel the need to do a second post tonight. Lucky you. Haha, it's more like I have too much to say and if I don't say it now, I would probably feel too lazy again.

Anyways, I am being quite unoriginal here as the title and theme of this post is from the poster I made for my Chinese class. As I mentioned in the previous post, I did not have time to visit a botanical garden while in Taiwan, but Taipei, as the title suggests, served as a botanical garden. I guess this had to do with how environmentally-conscious Taipei seemed to be, but there were a lot of labelled plants throughout the city. Granted, you might not find as much information as you would at a botanical garden, but that is pretty understandable.

國立臺灣大學 (National Taiwan University)
Seeing as my own college is an arboretum, I suppose I should not have been surprised to see that the plants at National Taiwan University were also labeled, especially since they have an agronomy department and offer, I'm pretty sure, quite a few plant science courses. Still it was cool to see plants labeled especially on such a huge campus; not only that, but some of the streets were named after plants as well.

楓香 (Fēng xiāng)
Chinese Sweetgum

The bark on this tree is so cool!
蘇鐵  (Sūtiě)
Sago Cycas

NTU even has an official flower, the azalea (杜鵑花 - Dùjuān huā), which were planted all over campus in an array of colors from white to light pink to magenta.

國立故宮博物院 (National Palace Museum)
Outside of the National Palace Museum, we saw quite a few camphor trees, which were labeled, as well as a large sign with information on the camphor tree--an important tree in Chinese culture perhaps?

樟樹 (Zhāngshù)
Camphor Tree

I've made it big for those of you who can read Chinese

The cool thing about this sign is that it offers quite a bit of information for a street sign; besides the Chinese name, it also has the English and scientific names, as well as other (Chinese) names, traits of the tree, and where it is native to (Taiwan), albeit all in Chinese. It even has closeups of what the flowers look like.

臺北市立動物園 (Taipei Zoo)
The zoo was another unexpected source of plant names. What's more, there was even a few large signs with the picture and name of flowers which attract certain types of butterflies, which I found pretty cool.

There is a butterfly on that apple slice

The cool billboard of flowers and butterflies

I'm pretty sure this butterfly and flower is featured on one of those billboards

Just two of the many little signs lying around the zoo helpfully informing visitors of what these plants are, plus many of them are native to Taiwan!

What's more, besides having just a panda house or a desert animal enclosure, the zoo also had a section for ferns. How cool is that?

Unfortunately I did not have a chance to go in and check it out as my class was moving pretty fast--it would have been nice to go in though.

臺北孔廟 (Taipei Confucius Temple)

Like the zoo, the temple had a lot of plants which were native to Taiwan. Like the camphor tree sign, these signs had the Chinese, English, and scientific names of the plants, along with general information like family, characteristics, native to, and usages, in both Chinese and English, the first I saw. Many of these plants had medicinal purposes, which I wonder if it had anything to do with being at a temple.

桂花 (Guìhuā)
Sweet Olive

肉桂 (Ròuguì)
Cassia Bark Tree

To conclude, while I may have characterized Taipei as a city serving as a botanical garden, most of these identification signs were in locations, such as museums and zoos, which would receive a lot of visitors. This could, in part, be due to the high awareness of environmental conservation in Taiwan, and so could be seen as an attempt to increase public knowledge on local flora. However, seeing that most of the signs were in Chinese, the information would only be accessible to a certain audience, which makes me wonder how knowledgeable the average Taiwanese person is on plant identification. Furthermore, since the information is pretty general ("used medicinally" as opposed to "used to treat coughs"), how knowledgeable is the average Taiwanese person on specific uses for plants compared to general usages? How florally aware was someone living in Taiwan 20 years ago as opposed to now? 

Wow, this started out as a blog post and ended up sounding like some report, or like my poster. Oops. ^^;; Anyways, just some food for thought. :)

Until next time~

Taipei: An Intersection of Urban Life and Wildlife

So awhile back, I went to Taiwan with my Chinese class for about 10 days. We stayed at 臺北市 (Taipei)、花蓮市 (Hualien) 、and 礁溪鄉 (Jiaoxi)。The experience was amazing and unforgettable--although we did not have the chance to visit a botanical garden, there was no shortage of plant life to be found in Taiwan. I have been meaning to blog about it for awhile now, but have not had the opportunity (nor motivation for that matter) until now.

So here is my long-overdue post on nature and plant life in Taiwan, starting with the capital city of Taipei.

This is actually a slide from my final presentation for my Chinese class (so any mistakes in the Chinese is my own fault), which was sort of an ethnobotanical study on the relationship between plants and people in Taiwan. One thing I noted was, despite how technologically advanced and modern Taiwan was, the environment and landscape seemed to be very nature-conscious and, as one of my classmates noted, Taiwan seemed to be very good in terms of space usage and landscape planning.

These next few pictures were taken from atop the 101st floor of 臺北101 (Taipei 101), which is one of the tallest skyscrapers in the world. From the giant windows lining the floors, you can see practically all of Taipei--it was pretty amazing and breathtaking.

The city of Taipei from atop Taipei 101--from this view, it looks just like any other busy city...

But as you can see, the city seems to be built in accommodation with the environment rather than regardless of it.

I was pretty impressed with some of the ways infrastructure was worked into the environment without destroying the landscape.

It was amazing to see how they utilized the environment to be able to coexist alongside nature--by no means am I saying that Taipei is the epitome of nature preservation or plant conservation but as a New Yorker, I think that there are some things to be learned from how the city was planned.

That is all for now, but definitely expect more Taiwan posts--soon, I hope!

Until next time~