Flying plums, crying plums

What to do when there's nothing to do?

My house is a typical modern urban Tokyo house, which means it doesn’t have a yard to speak of; just a few strips of dirt, enough to plant a few shrubs. But even though I enjoy gardening, I’ve never minded, because of the view across the street. Our neighbor’s garden is huge, easily the size of the footprint of my entire house. It’s the product of years of hard work on the part of the elderly woman who lives there. I’ve always loved looking out our windows and seeing the plums and kumquats and oranges, and the seasonal flower beds she’s tended over many years.

Or I should say I used to, for this cute patch of greenery was dismantled by a construction company two weeks ago.

This isn’t an unusual story. Real estate prices have been going up, and so a lot of old homes are getting knocked down and replaced with multiple smaller houses, or built up into big apartment complexes. But her lot remained for many years, a rambler house in the Showa post-war style, L-shaped, with sliding doors and orange roof tiles of fired clay. It even had a little engawa veranda for sitting and enjoying the garden, or just taking in the sun. Three generations of family lived there, and they wanted to update their living space. That necessitated knocking down the old home, and the garden along with it, for the old woman had grown too feeble to tend it anymore.

I’ve lived here, across the street, for more than a decade now, and almost every spring or summer day I’d see her weeding and pruning. Once a year she’d fertilize the soil, and at these times her whole family would pitch in. I’d watch as they trundled in bags of mulch and her son and grandson used a hand–pump to apply insecticide to the trees. She’d obviously put a lot of time into planning the garden out, because there was always something in bloom in nearly every season.

My favorite was late winter through early spring. While the rest of the neighborhood resembled a sepia photograph, her garden was technicolor. The kumquats and orange trees bore their fruits. Different species of camellia bloomed in red, white, and pink. My absolute favorites were the ume, the plum trees. She had two gorgeous specimens. Every February one bloomed white; the other reddish-purple. At their peak they looked like popcorn popping, and whenever I saw them I knew spring was just around the corner, no matter how cold it felt outside.

Plums are, I think, Japan’s most emotional flower. They’re known as haru wo tsugeru hana, “the blossoms that tell us spring is coming.” The blossoms of the sakura cherry are most commonly associated with the spring, and hanami, the viewing of these blossoms, has been a custom in my country for a millennium. But the plums precede the cherries by a month, and the origin of hanami was actually about the plums, not the cherries. Plum hanami dates back even further to the Heian era, 1,200 years ago.

Another traditional name for February is ume-mi-zuki, “the plum viewing month.”

The first ume were brought to Japan from China as medicinal fruits. This was a practice of the elite. But it didn’t take long for the nobility to realize how charming the flowers were. Perhaps this is because they have no rivals. They’re one of the first species to bloom every year, and deliver a heavenly fragrance, subtle and sweet, a literal breath of fresh air at the tail end of a long winter. In fact, the word Reiwa, the name of our current era, is tied to plum-blossom viewing. It was taken from the Manyoshu, Japan’s oldest poetry anthology, which was compiled in the Heian. It’s a combination of two characters that appear in a poem that goes,

In this auspicious month of early spring, the weather is fine and the wind gentle. The plum blossoms open like powder before a mirror, while the orchids give off the sweet scent of a sachet.

Japan’s all-time most famous plum aficionado is a man by the name of Sugawara-no-Michizane. He was a scholar, poet, and politician in the 9th century. Today he is revered as a Shinto kami called Tenman-Tenjin, the god of learning. For this reason, every Tenjin or Tenman-gu shrine will always have plum trees within their boundaries.

Sugawara-no-Michizane had a plum tree in the garden of his residence in Kyoto. But he found himself caught up in court intrigues and demoted. Then he was banished from the city in 901. He was bereft at having to leave his garden, with its splendid sakura and pine tree, but he was particularly sad about his beloved plum. In sorrow, he wrote an elegy for it:

Kochi fukaba

Nioi okoseyo

Ume no hana

Aruji nashi tote

Haru wo wasureruna

When the east wind blows,

May it carry your fragrance,

bloom, bloom, my plums!

Though you’ve lost your master,

Forget not the spring!

After Michizane left his residence, they say, the sakura died from heartbreak. But the pine and the plum leapt into the sky, desperate to rejoin their owner in his distant exile in Dazaifu in Fukuoka. The pine ran out of energy half way, landing in what is now Hyogo prefecture. But the plum tree made it all the way to Dazaifu! And you can see it there today, at Dazaifu Tenmangu shrine. People call it the Tobi-ume (flying plum), and it’s estimated at over 1,000 years old. Dazaifu Temangu is a home to 200 plum varieties, and tobi-ume usually starts blooming first, in white. I haven’t been to Daifu Temangu yet, but I’d sure like to see the Tobi-ume someday.

The Tobi-ume of Dazaifu Tenmangu shrine. Courtesy dazaifutenmangu.or.jp

Like Michizane, my (admittedly indirect) relationship with my neighbor’s plum trees ended abruptly. Michizane was forced out of his home. In my case, the end was signaled by the arrival of big trucks and heavy excavators. I’d known the house was coming down, because the owner’s daughter came by to tell us last year. I immediately asked her what would happen to the garden. “We can’t keep it,” she said. I guess the shock on my face was obvious, for she quickly added, “We’re going to miss the plum blossoms, too.” She didn’t look any happier about it than I was. But the house was old and falling apart and there was nothing else they could do. She even offered to give the trees to us if we had a way to extract them. Even if we could, though, we simply didn’t have room on our tiny lot for them.

Months went by. I tried to forget. But the minute the trucks arrived, a panic set in. I rushed outside to beg the workers to hold off for a moment, so I might cut some of the branches from plum trees. The trees were already budding; blooming was no more than a week away. Yet they had only minutes left in their long lifespans. The workers, looking at the forlorn trees, agreed to wait. I dashed back across the street to my house, grabbed a pair of pruning shears and told my husband that the time had come. We rushed out to salvage what we could.

It was the first time I’d ever entered the property and taken a close look at the plums. It was obvious they were quite old. Though they stood no taller than the bottom edge of the roof, their age was apparent from their beautifully gnarled trunks, which curved gracefully into complex shapes before lofting smaller branches in every direction. Once, I spoke to a traditional Japanese gardener. He told me the measure of a tree’s age isn’t it’s height: it is the tree’s shape, its beauty. Many centuries-old trees in Japanese gardens are quite short, because they’ve been constantly, meticulously trimmed to maintain their appearance. As the old woman who lived here had done with these plums.

There is a famous saying in Japan: sakura kiru baka, ume kiranu baka: “an idiot who cuts cherry trees; an idiot who doesn’t cut plum trees.” You shouldn’t cut cherry trees because they grow sick from the wounds. Plums, on the other hand, need to be actively trimmed after their blossoms fall, or they won’t bloom again as beautifully the next year. I know this because I have two plum bonsai, one red and one white, and nip their branches every year. As that old gardener told me to do.

My neighbor's trees were beautifully trimmed. Judging from the complexity of trunks and branches, the mother and her family took wonderful care of them. It couldn’t have been easy for them to make the decision to sacrifice these trees.

When I looked up, shears in hand, I could see that the red plum had yet to bud, but perhaps because of the angle of sunlight, the white one was already covered in them. Again the sadness welled up, because that gentle, old tree was so ready to bloom. Really, it was a matter of days.

“I’m so, so sorry,” I found myself saying as I began to trim, quickly, for the workers were idling their machines and waiting for me to get off the property. My husband helped reach taller and thicker branches. Together we culled as many as we could. Before we left, I touched the knotty trunks of those trees for the first time and last time, thanking them for bringing us joy every year, saying good-bye forever.

Later I heard the old woman had lived in that house since she was a little girl. That garden had so much history; the plum trees were probably older than she was. To nourish and grow something takes much time and work. Creating this garden took decades. Destroying it took less than an hour. It felt like a metaphor for so many things happening right now.

I was worried if the branches would bloom, because all the buds were still so tiny. But in the warmth of my room, they flourished beautifully. I know the flowers will fall soon, for branches without their mother-tree are destined to die. I wish I’d had the ability to move the plums across the street as Michizane’s Tobi-ume had. They wouldn’t even had had to fly far, if I had the yard to host them.

Big things change and it is out of our hands. So all we can do is focus on the little things that we can control. The little things that bring joy, however fleeting, and help us carry on. Because we must. Soon my little pair of plum bonsai, which live outside, will bloom as well. When I look at their flowers, I will remember those old trees, and keep their memory alive.