Thursday, October 18, 2007
By EVELYN SHIH
STAFF WRITER
Mum's not the word at the New York Botanical Garden's new fall show, opening this weekend.[Head gardener Yukie Shinakura with her flowers. Courtesy of New York Botanical Garden.]
The word is kiku, the Japanese word for chrysanthemums. The exhibit delves into the art of Japanese floriculture, with three traditional styles that date to the samurai age.
The ogiku, or single-stem variety, has one ample blossom atop each 6-foot stem. The kengai, or cascading chrysanthemum, spills down like a waterfall over rocks. The ozukuri, or thousand bloom, looks something like a pot of gold piled high with palm-size flowers.
These aren't your mother's mums.
"If you just leave chrysanthemums in your yard, they flower," said Yukie Kurashina, the head gardener for the show. "But if you want to make it most complicated, you can do that, too."
A long time coming
The exhibit has been five years in the planning. Three years ago, Kurashina traveled to her native Japan to study the art of kiku with Yasuhira Iwashita, the master and chief of the chrysanthemum department at Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden in Tokyo. As a college student in Kyoto, she had dabbled in growing kiku, but the time-consuming art is generally considered a pursuit for elderly masters, she said. While there, Kurashina saw for the first time the Chrysanthemum Exhibit, an annual Tokyo tradition that began in the 1880s. Iwashita currently curates that show and was happy to share his know-how with his new student.
At their nursery in the Bronx, Kurashina and other gardeners on the New York Botanical Garden team have given the exhibit a slightly American cast. They make adjustments for the weather -- this year's August and September have been kind to the plants, she said, but she and her team still have been tricking the plants into early bloom with darkened nurseries and varied temperatures.
They also do their work to rock-and-roll. Gardener Sharita Mason turned off her radio to speak about the plants.
"Our conditions are different from those in Tokyo," she said. "It's American conditions and an American staff."
But nothing in the process is lost in translation.
"They respond to the person who takes care of them, the chrysanthemums," said Mason. "And the person who works on them receives lots of inner gifts, because it's such a discipline. You do days and days of the same task, and you have to be very focused.
"You can see how this tradition was handed down by samurai warriors," she added.
Through a process of pinching off buds, the gardeners encourage the stems to grow longer. They then tie the stems into a certain structure to create neat formations.
This is how a chosen plant grows into a large bushel of tall flowers in the corner of the nursery and then becomes a trained, aesthetically pleasing ozukuri piece, explained Kurashina.
The nursery where the gardeners keep the ozukuri is dominated by traditional boat-like oak containers called sekidai. In each, more than a hundred large blooms -- or just-opening buds -- rest on a black metal rack in a pyramid shape. The gardeners have tied each individual flowering stem to its own little stand, complete with a white wire circle to help hold up the nodding blooms.
Like 'spoiled kids'
A peek below reveals that the entire display is grown from one thick stem. Split into exactly five branches -- three to arch in different directions in the front and two to spread like a fan in the back -- the plant was then allowed to grow straight up in a tall bouquet until the smaller stems were long enough to be bent into shape, said Kurashina.
It sounds torturous, but Mason assured that it isn't.
"We treat the thousand blossoms as spoiled kids," she said. "They've gotten everything they've ever wanted. They've been hand-misted, they've gotten special soil mixes, they listen to classical music when Yukie's here, they get groomed by hand."
"These plants are touched so much," said Kurashina. "Each time we take off buds, or bend them like this, they are touched."
The smaller kengai flowers also receive this treatment. In a different nursery, Kurashina and her assistants had tied what look like smaller, garden-variety mums to sheets of chicken wire. Suspended horizontally, the wire hammocks hold flowers that all grew from single plants.
"The pots are filled with roots," explained Kurashina. The mass of ridged leaves, buds and flowers will be "cascading" down from high perches in the conservatory courtyard -- in the most orderly fashion.
The process of cultivating chaotic growth into ordered shapes takes a different sort of skill than other work at the botanical garden, said Mason, who has gardened for the spring show. Other plants will do just fine with automated watering and fertilizing.
"These are brought up by hand, by feeling, by intuition," she said. "It's sort of an inner communication. You have to be extremely observant, watching them every day, and be in tune with them."
E-mail: shih@northjersey.com
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WHAT TO EXPECT: The main exhibit will be at the conservatory courtyard, just outside the greenhouse with the tropical trees. The chrysanthemums will be in specially erected shelters, called "uwaya," around ponds. The centerpiece will be a bamboo sculpture by ikebana master Tetsunori Kawana.
OTHER FEATURES: In keeping with the Japanese theme, there will be a bonsai tree exhibit, Japanese maples and bamboo, an illustrated exhibition of Japanese plants at the garden's library museum and hands-on activities for adults and kids. Tours, music and dance performances will also be featured.
WHEN: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday through Nov. 18. Closed Mondays.
WHERE: New York Botanical Garden, 200th Street and Kazimiroff Boulevard, Bronx. 718-817-8700 or nybg.org.
HOW MUCH: $18, seniors and students $16, children 2 to 12 $5.
Copyright © 2007 North Jersey Media Group Inc.
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