Driving on this beautiful day in my town,I came across beauty! I was envious.
Stopping to admire the above floral displays, I happened upon a secret Camellia garden. It was obvious that the dedicated gardener knows what he/she is doing...I was drawn in, though uninvited, but no one came out to greet me or scold me. What I saw took my breath away. And to think I discovered it just at the peak of the year. I am determined to meet the gardener.
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HOLY COW!
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Southern Living says an energetic Frenchman named André Michaux impacted Southern gardens
more profoundly than anyone. Plant explorer and botanist
to King Louis XVI, he established
the South’s first botanical garden just north of Charleston in 1786.
Now- familiar species
he introduced sound like a Who’s Who
of Southern classics―sweet olive (Osmanthus fragrans), ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba), mimosa (Albizia julibrissin), Chinese parasol tree (Firmiana simplex), and Chinaberry (Melia azedarach). One stands out above the rest―the common camellia (Camellia japonica).
Tsubaki-mochi(椿餅) are sandwiched buns between two leaves of camellia.
This confection appears in the Tale of Genji although it didn't contain
sugar. Camellia leaves are inedible, but cherry leaves wrapping
sakura-mochi are edible.
Camellias have been favored as one of flowers appropriate for tea
ceremonies or tea house. Powerful people including Toyotomi
Hideyoshi, Tokugawa Hidetada the second Shogun of the
Tokugawa Shogunate also loved camellia blossoms. It became a status
symbol for cultural figures to have camellias, and various varieties of
camellias had been created during the Edo Period. A fondness for
camellias spread among commoners.
A nephew of the first Shogun ordered a painter to paint a 24m-long
picture scroll called“
One Hundred Camellias”in 1635.
The scroll
shows a variety of flowers arranged not only in flower vases but in
articles for daily use such as a bowl, a fan, a basket, a trash tray.
Forty-nine foremost cultural figures including the second lord of the
Mito domain, poets, scholars, monks wrote 52 poems in the margin of the
scroll. The poems include the above Sakato no Hitotari's poem.
Some varieties of camellias written on it are now lost. The process of
improvement in camellia varieties can be inferred from the scroll.
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| The size of a dime, it was the smallest one |
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I just ordered this book from Amazon. It is an "astonishing and unknown story of Marie Duplessis, the courtesan who inspired Alexandre Dumas fils’s novel and play
La dame aux camélias, Giuseppe Verdi’s opera
La Traviata, George Cukor’s film
Camille, and Frederick Ashton’s ballet
Marguerite and Armand.
Sarah Bernhardt, Eleonora Duse, Greta Garbo, Isabelle Huppert, Maria
Callas, Anna Netrebko, and Margot Fonteyn are just a few of the
celebrated actors, singers, and dancers who have portrayed her." Who knew?
" Kavanagh brilliantly re-creates the
short, intense, and passionate life of the tall, pale, slender girl who
at thirteen fled her brute of a father and Normandy to go to Paris,
where she would become one of the grand courtesans of the 1840s.
France’s national treasure, Alexandre Dumas père,
was intrigued
by her, his son became her lover, and Franz Liszt, too, fell under her
spell. Quick to adapt an aristocratic mien, with elegant clothes, a
coach, and a grand apartment, she entertained a salon of dandies,
writers, and artists. . Her
early death at age twenty-three from tuberculosis created an outpouring
of sympathy."
noted by Charles Dickens, who wrote in February 1847:
“
For
several days all questions political, artistic, commercial have been
abandoned by the papers. Everything is erased in the face of an incident
which is far more important, the romantic death of one of the glories
of the demi-monde, the beautiful, the famous Marie Duplessis.” ..
