Page:Japanese Gardens (Taylor).djvu/405

Rh Bamboo hedge; Tiger Lilies, burning in a jungle, as if they were the beast, not the blossom; and blood-red L. elegans, like a great ruby dropped from a crown, glowing serenely in the ditch that drained a paddy-field. It was always a miracle. Like every new baby, each one was an individual, a solemn and beautiful gift, straight from God.

That the Japanese themselves do not value and admire Lilies is another of the fallacies so often repeated, which no one has ever taken the trouble to dispute. One of the first writers on the flora of Japan made the rash statement that her flowers had no perfume, her birds did not sing, and—but I will not repeat the third. I have heard it quoted and requoted ad nauseam, and on one occasion by a friend who was walking beside me as I carried homeward through the woods, lyric with birds’ voices, a sheaf of Lilies almost overpoweringly sweet. So the tale goes on that, because the Japanese love so deeply the subtle, poet-sung blossoms of Plum, Wistaria, Cherry, and Iris, they disdain those more obvious beauties of their fields and hill-sides; that they eat the roots of their Lilium auratum; ergo, they cannot love or admire them. Yes, and also do they eat the roots of the sacred Lotus and the young shoots of Bamboo, and yet no one suggests that these are not regarded and honoured. I have seen peasants by the tens, and small boys by the dozens, carrying home those same Lilies