Scent of spring

Sunday, as we loafed around the house and monshu and I chatted about many things, talk turned to flowers. The narcissus in the sunroom are going great guns, flooding the nook with fragrance; the batch in the dim dining room, not so much. So the Old Man retired the second batch and brought in a budding hyacinth which I immediately nicknamed "Pinky". He responded by denying the pinkness of the buds, but now the his error of judgment is clear for all to see.

The "paper whites", as he calls them, hold a special place in his memories because they were always the first flowers to emerge around the house where he grew up. "You don't have snowdrops where you lived?" I asked, puzzled. Apparently not. But they did have "naked ladies", a spring flower I'd never heard of before. He explained the name by describing how the flower stalks come up first, and only after the blooms have faded do the long slender leaves poke out.

"Are they pink?" I asked. "Yes, and very fragrant. If you had a clump of five or six of them, you'd smell the perfume fifty feet away." "Surprise lilies!" I said. I don't remember the fragrance, but I remember surprise lilies. We had a healthy patch of them in the back yard of the house in Troy. But they didn't bloom in the spring; they were definitely a summer flower. So were monshu's a different variety or did they simply respond differently to the very different climate of southern California?

A lily tree by any other name

I was looking over monshu's shoulder as he scanned eBay for Japanese prints to bid on. He was considering one that depicted a magnolia in bloom. "Aren't those what you call 'tulip trees'?" he asked. I had to explain that, no, the only people I knew who called them that were southerners who reserved "magnolia" for evergreen magnolias; growing up where the only evergreen magnolias were in hothouses, we didn't make that discrimination. Besides, we would never have mistaken a tulip tree, which grows up straight and leafy and as tall as a tree out of Tolkien with the stunted spring shrubs with their purplish blooms.

I showed him the Wikipedia article for "tulip tree" and was astonished to find out that there's a species native to China; I'd always thought of them as a distinctly American tree like the cottonwood or the black walnut. Of course, I immediately wanted to know the Chinese name. A bit of sleuthing turned up 鵝掌楸 ézhǎngqiú or "goose foot catalpa".

This had us a little baffled. The alternative name, 馬褂木 mǎguàmù "magua tree" (a magua or "horse gown" being a kind of Qing Dynasty riding jacket) no less. Then I remembered the guide to native trees I'd bought in Beijing and looked up "Liriodendron" in the scientific name index. "Because the leaf resemble a goose's foot," it informed us, "and also the leaf of the catalpa tree, so it gets its name. Also called 'magua tree" because the outspread leaf resembles a magua." I leave you all to judge that for yourselves.

The Koreans call them 목백합 /mokpaykhap/ "tree lilies" or 백합나무 /paykhapnamu/ "lily trees", using the Sino-Korean and native Korean words for "tree", respectively, paired with the Sino-Korean for "lily". The Japanese, by contrast, go all native and call them yuri no ki, which has the same meaning. Of course, tulips are an even more recent introduction to Korea and Japan than they are to Europe, so the substitution is understandable--moreso when one considers it might even be a calque on the botanical name, Liriodendron.

Curiously, though, "lily" doesn't appear in the name of the surprise lilies, which--like so many of our loveliest flowers--are imports from East Asia. To the Japanese, they are 夏水仙 natsuzuisen or "summer narcissus". (The narcissus, in turn, is literally translated a "water immortal".) Even more curious is the Korean name 상사화 /sangsahwa/, 상사 (相思) being a term which Martin glosses as "mutal (reciprocal, reciprocated) love, pining for each other" and 화 (花) being Sino-Korean for "flower".