Page:Scidmore--Java the garden of the east.djvu/112

92 We found all the countless common fragrant flowers that are so necessary to these esthetic, perfume-loving people heaped for sale in the flower-market of the passer, along with the oils and the gums and spices that give out, and burn with, such delicious odors. Short-stemmed roses and heaps of loose rose-petals were laid on beds of green moss or in bits of palm-leaf in a way to delight one's color-sense, and, with the mounds of pale-green petals of the kananga, or ylang-ylang-tree's blossoms, filled the whole air with fragrance. We dried quantities of kananga flowers for sachets, as they will crisp even in the damp air of Java, and retain their spicy fragrance for years; but the exquisite white-and-gold "Bo-flowers," the sacred sumboja or frangipani (the Plumeria acutifolia of the botanists), would not dry, but turned dark and mildewed wherever one petal fell upon another. This lovely blossom of Buddha is sticky and unpleasant to the touch when pulled from the tree, and the stem exudes a thick milk. After they have fallen to the ground they may be handled more easily, and fallen flowers retain the spotless, waxen perfection of their thick, fleshy petals for even two days. One wonders that the people do not more often wear these flowers of the golden heart in their black hair; but the sumboja is a religious flower in Java, as in India, and in Buddhist times was almost as much an attribute and symbol of that great faith as the lotus. This Bo-flower is still the favorite offering, together with the champaka, or Arabian jasmine, in the Buddhist temples of Burma and Ceylon, and is often laid before the few images of that old religion now remaining in Java.