Tag: magnolia

Puzzle flower in a Japanese temple

The first garden we visited in Kyoto belonged to the Tenryu-ji temple in Arashiyama. It was a sunny day and the light was becoming mellow as we walked through the garden. Near the upper end I took a photo of this flower. I’m pretty sure it is a magnolia, but I don’t know exactly why. I guess the shape and texture of leaves is one reason, but is it also something about the flower? Lots of magnolia flowers are more cup shaped, but I’m almost certain I’ve seen this shape of a flower somewhere else in the wild. Have you? Or are you absolutely sure that this isn’t a magnolia?

Susan Rushton points out that I was completely off-track. This seems to be the cultivar called Venus of a sweetshrub (genus Calycanthus). The sweetshrubs are not a speciose genus, having only three members. If it wasn’t for the many cultivars, they would be very easy to identify.

Himalayan wildflowers

Our senses are poor servants. Even colour sense, which is the most acute as it is the most important for our purpose, is weak. We have, it is true, definite names for many colours, but how many of us recognize them when we see them? But our colour names are few in comparison with the number of shades we wish to distinguish, and that is the measure of our vagueness. … Thus, we do not match flower colour, we merely indicate its quality; only haberdashers match colours.

  • Primula
  • Rhododendron
  • Magnolia
  • Wild strawberry

Smells are even more indefinite. Some are indistinguishable from tastes, or the two are so involved that it is difficult to say where one ends and the other begins. But there are only five primary tastes- sweet, bitter, saline, acid and pungent- not one of which can be confused with any smell; it is only when we come to deal with flavours that, again resorting to analogy, we get into difficulties. … In fact, we can do little with smells except classify them as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ or ‘aromatic’ and ‘foetid’.

It is this capital difficulty which prevents people from attempting to say much about scent in flowers and leaves.

I quote from Frank Kingdon Ward’s book, The Riddle of Tsangspo Gorges