Flowers and Chaos
For generations, Japanese have used flowers as symbols of seasons – but climate change is upending our assumptions.
Spring has sprung, as they say. And that means flowers. The somei yoshino cherry trees have bloomed and fallen in Tokyo. Although this species of cherry is virtually synonymous with spring here, the real show is only just beginning. Once those early bloomers fall from the branches, it is time for another species, the yae-zakura, the double-cherry tree, to shine. In my neighborhood park, I can see all sorts of varieties. Pink, yellow, and white, fluffy as pom-poms, cheering the skies above like nature’s own halftime show. And here and there among the double-cherries are the shidare-zakura, the weeping cherries, their flower-filled branches drooping low, waving in the breeze like pastel curtains.
And the show isn’t just playing out overhead. Violets and dandelions color the ground. Azaleas, linked to the end of April in the collective Japanese season-consciousness, can be spotted in the gardens of many homes. And once they finish their show, wisteria start blooming, and then the maples fill out with their own blankets of leaves. The awakening of each plant is like a season in miniature, each species passing the baton to the other in a tidy order determined long before we humans ever walked the Earth.
There is a famed four-character idiom that describes the beauty of flowers: hyakka-ryoran (百花繚乱), which means “sprays of flowers blooming everywhere,” but is written with four characters that read “hundred-flower-chaos,” (even though nobody thinks of it in these literal terms.) The phrase evokes images of Eden-esque gardens, an expression of nature’s beauty. It’s one of my favorite idioms, and I know I’m not alone, for it is also a popular motif in traditional art.
This 1844 painting by Baiitsu Yamamoto is a textbook example of hyakka ryoran. But if you know your flowers, you may notice something strange. All of the different varieties are in bloom at once. This isn’t how it would be in nature. Narcissus bloom between February and April. Hydrangea in June. Peonies, April and May. Lilies in July. Chrysanthemum are September through November. Camellia, December through April. It’s impossible for all of these flowers to bloom at the same time, so this painting is a kind of fantasy. It’s also fantastically beautiful, which is why you also see hyakka ryoran motifs in traditional garments like kimono.
I love this kind of “flower chaos,” but the problem is, fantasy has started creeping into reality. 2023 was the planet’s warmest year ever, at least going back to the start of the official records in 1850. Of course, that affected the flowers in Tokyo. That year, the species that usually bloom from April to May bloomed in fast-forward, crunched into an unusually short period of time. There was even a moment where you could see double-cherry, azalea, and wisteria overlapping – unthinkable by the traditional calendar.
This was real flower chaos, stunning at first glance (I’d never seen such a sight before!) but also unsettling. Seeing the natural progression of things, something I’d taken for granted, upended in this way made me worry about the future.
This year, the flowers seem to be back on track for a “normal” schedule of blooming. But even still, I noticed something new and strange. We missed another sort of miniature season, sankan-shion (三寒四温), written with the characters for “three cold and four warm days,” which describes the expected alternation of warmer and cooler days in spring. This year, we had cool days, but the warm ones haven’t been warm – they’ve been hot, borderline summer temperatures. But it’s only March.
The Japanese have all sorts of idioms to describe nature. Nature doesn’t speak in words, but I think it’s trying to tell us something, too.