Pity the manga translator faced with cherry blossoms in an opening scene. You could fill a book trying to convey the associations, such is the evocative power of these blossoms – sakura – in full bloom. Spring time. Picnics. The faces of family and the company of friends. The jitters of a new school year. Starting out in the world of work: smart suit, sweaty palms. Peace, pleasure, purpose – tinged with an awareness that the future will all too soon be the past. There is no keeping the blossom on the tree.
But for all their feted fragility, Japan’s cherry blossoms have weathered the past century and a half remarkably well. They have found themselves pressed into the service of dramatically conflicting visions of modern Japan: saplings given to international allies, flowers adorning kamikaze flying caps and fuselages, sakura imagery adopted by the far right. They have been the focus of an annual commercial onslaught, from seasonal pink-and-white product packaging to endless tie-in campaigns. And still they retain their innocence and resonance.
This survival of the sakura’s symbolism is every bit as interesting as the story of the trees themselves, and the role of the English expert Collingwood “Cherry” Ingram in preserving them. By deftly combining the two themes, Naoko Abe, formerly a journalist for Japan’s Mainichi newspaper and now living in the UK, manages to transform Ingram’s life from horticultural footnote into historical adventure.
Born in 1880 and home-schooled in wealthy Westgate-on-Sea, in Kent, Ingram grew up in an English idyll. The sounding of the meal gong would be met with the fluttering of wings as a small, hungry host – a jackdaw, together with a few sparrows and blackbirds – made for the table. “Nature was the boy’s religion”, Abe writes. And you can see what she means in an accomplished boyhood sketch, full of joy and feeling, featuring four young birds chirruping heavenwards from their nest.
The flipside of his devotion to nature was a seriousness about sacrilege. He became a renowned ornithologist, only to turn his back on the subject when it appeared to lose its way: “When the editor of one of the world’s premier ornithological journals deemed it of sufficient interest to publish a paper in which the author recorded the number of times a great tit defecated every 24 hours, I came to the conclusion that it was high time I occupied my thoughts with some other aspect of nature. I chose plants.”
Ingram opted for cherry trees, setting himself up for fresh disappointment on a botanical expedition to Japan in 1926. On his first visit in the early 1900s, the country had appeared to Ingram – as it did to many other western travellers – positively Eden-like in its freedom from “smoke-begrimed cities” and the cynicism they bred. This was a land, he thought, where “man adds to, instead of detracts from, the beauty of his country”. But in its hunger for industry and status, Japan gorged itself on all things western, resulting in a “violent aesthetic indigestion”, one of whose saddest signs was the steady impoverishment of the country’s cherry blossom culture.
The sakura were being made to work diplomatic and domestic overtime: the gateway to a Japanese garden at the Japan-British Exhibition (1910) had been guarded by samurai warriors standing below two artificial cherry trees; Tokyo’s mayor sent thousands of cherry trees to New York and Washington DC in thanks for American mediation to end the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5; back at home, cherry blossoms were becoming ubiquitous in poetry, story and song, romanticising the short and selfless lives for which a nation frequently at war required its citizens to prepare. And yet the centuries of botanical expertise and connoisseurship on which all this rested was fading. Many of the old aristocratic gardens where the trees were tended had been lost to building work, tea plantations and mulberry bushes (used to feed silkworms, which in turn fed a valuable export industry). Meanwhile, with Japanese officialdom more concerned with symbolism than with nature or aesthetics, the country’s enviable variety of wild and cultivated cherry trees was losing ground – literally – to the hardy and fast-growing Somei-yoshino species.
Ingram’s discovery of this tragic trajectory, and his response to it, form the core of Abe’s sympathetic and engrossing account, which draws extensively on Ingram’s published and unpublished writings alongside interviews with surviving members of his family. We find his 1926 visit turning into a weeks-long sakura angyo – “cherry blossom pilgrimage” – the aim of which is the preservation of Japan’s cherry tree inheritance. That inheritance was never seriously imperilled, and talk of “saving” the blossoms feels a little inflated and unnecessary. But the quest is beautifully rendered: journeys on foot and horseback, through temple gardens and along mountain ridges – onwards to Tokyo’s Arakawa river, where he encounters a kindred spirit in the cherry tree expert Seisaku Funatsu, whose “loving vigilance” he credits with protecting many trees from fatal neglect.
Back in Kent, Ingram continued grafting cuttings from Japan and around the world on to the Prunus avium species. By the early 1930s, his garden was home to more than 79 varieties of cherry, including one that was seemingly extinct in its native Japan – and which he resolved to reintroduce. Such is Abe’s talent for storytelling across history and horticulture, together with the space she gives to Ingram’s own passionate, lyrical, and occasionally drily humorous turn of phrase, that here as elsewhere in the book even readers with little prior interest in gardens and gardening may find themselves becoming unexpectedly invested.
Japan-watchers will recognise the broader message for and about contemporary Japan that Abe seeks to convey. She lauds ordinary citizens as the true stewards of the country’s heritage, and, no doubt with Japanese ambivalence about multiculturalism in mind, she hints heavily at “diversity” as a virtue spanning the botanical and sociopolitical realms. Many will applaud such sentiments. Others will note that Ingram himself was little interested in politics, beyond its ramifications for nature. They will prefer to read this book in that spirit: as a portrait of great charm and sophistication, rich in its natural and historical range, guaranteeing that you won’t look at cherry blossoms the same way again.
• Christopher Harding’s Japan Story is published by Allen Lane. ‘Cherry’ Ingram is published by Chatto (£18.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
