Japanese Flowering Cherries by Wybe Kuitert (free)

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Horticole (p. 390) as Cerasus Juliana floribus roseis and described by Carrière in the article Cerasus Juliana Flore Pleno, attracting the attention of Gartenflora as well. In 1876 The Garden (2: 486) introduced Cerasus Juliana Hort. floribus roseis. The same 'Fukurokuju'-like plant as in the French magazines was once more shown as Cerasus pseudo-cerasus Lindley in a beautiful engraving in Lavallée's Icones (18801885), and Philipp Franz von Siebold's nursery could show a flowering Cerasus pseudocerasus odorata var. Reine de Paijs-Bas at the international horticultural exhibition held in Amsterdam in 1877. Botanists and specialist-horticulturists had discovered and acknowledged the qualities of the flowering cherry. The Western public at large was about to discover the exotic culture of Japan. Artistic circles in Paris found inspiration in a romantically exotic image of Japan as it was presented by Aimé Humbert in his extremely well illustrated travel report Le Japon Illustré (1870). Emile Guimet repeated the effort in his beautifully designed volumes Promenades Japonaises (1878, 1880). The art-loving public in the French capital started collecting Japanese woodblock prints that inspired the impressionist painters. The cherry was often present as a decorative motif in posters or other graphic illustrations. The press showed a growing interest in reports on Japan, the land of geisha and Fujiyama, the consistent misspelling for Fuji-san (Mount Fuji), the volcano with an incredibly regular and splendid cone that became the foremost symbol of the Land of the Rising Sun. In the United States the journalist Lafcadio Hearn (18591904) introduced Japan to a large public by interpreting its enigmas in a way that had literary qualities. Hearn, who lived the latter part of his life in Japan, wrote of the first day of his arrival in April 1890. His first book, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894), described it thus: And I see before me what is infinitely more interestinga grove of cherry trees covered with something unutterably beautifula dazzling mist of snowy blossoms clinging like summer cloudfleece about every branch and twig; and the ground beneath them, and the path before me, is white with the soft, thick, odorous snow of fallen petals. . . . Why should the trees be so lovely in Japan? With us, a plum or cherry tree in flower is not an astonishing sight; but here it is a miracle of beauty so bewildering that, however much


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