a fine old plum
old plum
old plum
Though it is one of the world’s most rapacious consumers of wood, Japan worships trees like no other place I’ve been to. Where else would such love and attention be lavished on a couple of four hundred year old plum trees, which, left to their own devices would have up and died ages ago? There is something intensely poignant about these venerable plums, brought from Korea back in 1609, to Matsushima’s Zuiganji temple. To keep them alive, the rotting trunks have been heroically patched with cement and the saggy, senescent branches propped up with poles. The trees are like ancient pets tended to by generations of Zen Buddhist monks, who are born and die in the span of time it takes the plum tree to accumulate a few infinitesimally thin growth rings. And the payoff? What is it exactly? A few ephemeral blossoms, pink and white, to herald the end of a long winter. It is heartening to know that despite the hundreds of years of turbulence, of typhoons, fratricidal wars and pestilence, an unbroken line of caregivers has thought these trees to be worth their attention. To be sure, the Japanese sense of duty must have had a lot to do with it, but there is something else too: a kind of appreciation of the fragile that in my mind has no equal anywhere else in the world.
