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~