Now it is really nice in a home office. While I would have been in the business view only to a rear yard with car Parking space, I see home on the old Apple tree in the garden, beginning to bloom now. In addition, a young cherry, which attracts also gradually the white wedding dress. I’m fascinated by the window and think of how I was years ago in Japan, the cherry blossom experience time. Therefore, the inhabitants of the island are at this time out of the house.
“is connected to Every milestone in my life, like most of the Japanese with cherry blossoms,” writes the Nagoya-born and now lives in London, journalist Naoko Abe (61) in her newly published book “Hanami”. In it, she tells the miraculous story of the British botanist, Collingwood “Cherry” Ingram (1880-1981), the beginning of the 20th century. Century 50 Japanese flowering cherry species in England is planted in the you are saved from extinction and later returned to the far East brought.
From 1902 until 1926, Ingram traveled to the Land of the rising sun. At first fascinated, he leaves it the last time “tears” and noted in his diary: “The ancient far Eastern cities were obliterated, and in its place an ultra be built in the Western building of enormous Size and ugliness.” What hurts the friend of nature even more: Of the originally 400 flowering cherry varieties, the Japanese woods after the Opening of the country in 1853, and in the course of the subsequent industrialisation, send the most.
812 hosted the Imperial court for the first Time, a cherry-blossom viewing, called Hanami. From that time until the early 12th century. Century began, the breeding and cultivation of the trees. “The cherry blossoms have been appreciated by the rich aristocrats as aesthetic objects, and the object of literary value,” says Abe. It was not, however, have been only the Elite, the flowers of cherries as a pastime appreciated: “In the Edo period between 1603 and 1868 were planted in public places for the simple population of thousands of trees.”
this diversity is in the present, hardly anything left. “I had never thought about, why most of the in Japan, growing cherry trees – seven in ten – of the same variety belonged,” writes Abe. And she adds: “When I went in 2001 to London, I was surprised by the diversity of cherry trees in the British Isles.” Sometimes the merit of Ingram.
most of all, he appreciated the Taihaku tree “tai” for large, “haku” for white, because he has up to six inches of large flowers. A of Ingram pulled Taihaku-Engine-made it in 1932, with the TRANS-Siberian railway to Japan – jammed between two potato halves as a nutrient supplier. Today, the 88-year-old Taihaku tree is flowering at the Hirano Shrine in Kyoto, and a plaque tells of his adventurous journey from the UK to the Japanese island.
Naoko Abe, “Hanami – The miraculous story of the Englishman who brought the Japanese the cherry blossom back,” S. Fischer
