KCJS Professor 2003
Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and East Asian Studies
Brown University
Providence, Rhode Island, U.S.A.
The importation of rare exotic plants from other countries has spawned both a fascination with other climates and cultures as well as anxiety about the encroachment of alien species into the indigenous terrain as aggressive foreign importations are perceived to displace native flora. This of course is nothing new in the history of the world, but the rhetoric elicited by this perceived threat and/or cultural exchange offers a chance to examine the thinly veiled ideological contours of nations at specific historical moments through the metaphor of horticulture.
But rather than focus on the broad issues of international horticultural exchange, I'd like to look briefly at a few issues involving plant nomenclature. We are told in the Book of Genesis in the Bible that Adam was given the privilege of assigning names to plants and animals by God as proof of his dominion over them. The issue of naming as well as its implications is (dare I say it?) a thorny one, especially with respect to plant nomenclature. The pivotal moment in modern European history of course was provided by Carl Linnaeus whose Species Plantarum along with the Genera Plantarum in 1754 marked the beginning of the revolution in plant naming. Linnaeus not only sought to organize systematically the plants known to him in Western Europe through a universal taxonomy but also sent his numerous disciples to far-flung corners of the world to bring back hitherto unknown specimens. A number died in the attempt but Linnaeus bestowed on them a form of immortality by using latinized forms of their names as genus names. Whereas formerly plants were referred to by various names, usually as descriptors of their form, fragrance, use, perceived similarity, locale where they were to be found, or some other such determinant, after Linnaeus typically a plant would be identified by its genus name, frequently a clue to its ostensible'discoverer' and its species name, which would involve a latinized descriptor, i.e. Thunbergia alata. Hence, as others such as Jamaica Kincaid have pointed out, gardening becomes a form of vicarious travel and by implication the history of conquest and imperialism appears to be mirrored in the botanical domain as well.
In Japan, horticultural nomenclature assumed a rather different trajectory. Since I am just at the beginning of my research project on this topic and its implications, rather than offer a speculative and flawed overview of this subject, I'd like to make note of just a few points.
When we look at early literary texts such as the Man'yoshu and Genji Monogatari, we find both replete with the names of plants, ranging from nanagusa, the catalog of the names of the seven famous grasses of the former, and the countless flower names often associated with the eponymous hero's amorous conquests in the latter, such as Yugao, Murasaki, Suetsumuhana, and Aoi as celebrated in the waka exchanged between characters. Even before Genji, we can detect the associative resonance between poetry and plants. A field flower such as ominaeshi within the poetic canon of waka automatically conjures up the image of a fair maiden whereas plants such as wasuregusa (the grasses of forgetfulness) allow for witty poetic wordplay about lost love.
Demonstrably, the early preoccupation with the indigenous landscape and its features entails the elevation of specific native flora into the poetic corpus, thereby underscoring the use of yamatokotoba. These become further self-selected so that the poetic canon far from including all natural elements includes numerous specific plants that contain specific seasonal, associative, and homophonic resonance. These are not necessarily the most showy, elegant or rare flowers, herbs, shrubs or trees, but are rather, like uta-makura (the famous poetic place names), those horticultural elements that have assumed a specific poetic reverberation.
What is startling is the way in which following the Heian Period it is increasingly no longer poetry using the horticultural palette but horticulture relying on the poetic or literary canon as a sourcebook. Hence, we find a variety of Callicarpa, commonly known as Beautyberry in English, known in Japanese as Murasaki Shikibu or the genus Hirta, rather unpleasantly named toad lily in Engish, as Hototogisu, that bird often associated with romantic desire in waka. If we scan the Edo Period work Kinshu Makura (The Brocade Pillow) for example, for the names given to the variety of azalea blooming traditionally in the fifth month known as Satsuki, almost all of the names of the cultivars possess a kind of cultural or poetic resonance, e.g. Utsusemi, Matsushima, and Genpei, most relying on yamatokotoba along with a few Chinese compounds also with literary overtones such as Meigetsu or Taiheikan.
One of the most interesting examples of the way in which poetry becomes the respository for horticultural labels is the maple variety known in English as Acer reticulata, var. Shigitatsusawano. The specific cultivar name, Shigitatsusawano is a direct quotation from the famous waka by the late twelfth century priest Saigyo, which reads:
kokoro nakite/mi ni mo aware wa/shirarekeri/shigitatsu sawa no/aki no yugure.
Having renounced the heart, still I cannot but feel/ the pangs of beauty/a marsh snipe soars aloft/in the autumn gloaming.
It is difficult to imagine a plant being referred to as 'the liquefaction of her (Julia's) clothes' or 'Ill-met by moonlight, proud Titania.' The closest we seem to approach to this conflation of the literary and the horticultural in the European tradition is the recent line of hybridized roses by David Austin, known as 'English roses,' among whose varieties are Othello and the Wife of Bath. But it is not merely the attribution of one name to a literary character that seems to characterize the landscape of horticultural nomenclature in Japan, but rather the reciprocality of the parallel realms of literature and horticulture in which each addition is not viewed as an expansion of the cultural repository but rather as the fulfillment and reverberation of it through the principle of identification.
