Flowers - Gina
In Ya’an, the cut flower shops are mostly outdoors. Our first experience with flowers from one of these shops was on Teacher’s day. One day I noticed that the shops were all swarming with customers. That evening we got a call from a Chinese friend of a Chinese friend who wanted to pay us a visit. She came to our apartment to give us a Teacher’s Day bouquet. Then I understood why the cut flowers shops were so busy that day.
My favorite type of cut flower in China is a type of super fragrant white blossom that is threaded onto a wire and sold by street peddlers. These flowers look and smell like a combination of gardenia and jasmine. I’ve seen them in all kinds of places, for instance taxi cabs. I have some in my kitchen.
We haven’t been in many people’s homes, but when we had the opportunity to experience the gamba craftsman’s upscale apartment in Beijing, I was struck by the beautiful bouquet of dried flowers in a Chinese vase. You also see dried flowers in tea. The most common dried flowers are chrysanthemums.
From monasteries to apartment balconies to hostels to Tibetan houses we have seen numerous potted flowers. Most of the pots we’ve seen are white plastic, but there are plenty of traditional Chinese clay and porcelain pots. I love seeing old traditional things here because the Chinese are so busy demolishing the old and developing really ugly and shiny new.
There don’t seem to be many cultivated flowers growing out of the ground, so when I do come across them, I get excited. Some of the prettiest cultivated flowers I’ve seen in China were at the panda reserve. The little trumpet type flowers, for example, were at the panda reserve and were flocked with a large number of hummingbirds. It’s also exciting to see familiar flowers, like the nasturtiums growing in front of so many Tibetan entrance ways.
China has many flowering trees, but I only have a few pictures of the most common variety that I’ve seen. This variety also comes in yellow. They say that in the spring the flowering trees are spectacular. Can’t wait.
Summer is the time for lotus flowers. They really got to me. I had a very difficult time pulling myself away from them. I just could not get enough. Their blossoming cycle is so extended that each stage is like a completely new flower. Just as you think you might be ready to stop oohing and aahing over the beautiful pink lotus, you discover a white one. It all began in Beijing where we stayed at the Lotus Hostel, an old courtyard compound. This environment was a little piece of paradise. Of course there were lotus growing in the courtyard at the hostel, but most of our lotus viewing was in various palaces and parks in Beijing. The lotus had such an impact on me that I named a fiddle tune that I wrote in the courtyard of the hostel “The Lotus Waltz”.
There are hundreds of squash vines growing in the countryside in Sichuan province, and it is striking to see these yellow flowers sprinkled against the vast green of the agricultural landscape. There were white flowered vine canopies covering the courtyard at the Lotus hostel in Beijing. The only place that I’ve seen nasturtium was in the Tibetan region of western Sichuan where we went on a five day trek with a Tibetan guide and stayed in a couple of Tibetan homes. Many Tibetan houses included nasturtiums, calendula, asters and cosmos in the entranceways. Tibetan culture in general is very colorful.
All of the pictures in this section were taken on our weekend hike up to the waterfall. This is the place that Lou refers to as Shangri La. This was my first experience with wildflowers in China. I was beside myself with joy. It was such a thrill. The only familiar flowers that I saw were butterfly bushes, complete with butterflies. I am not one to use the word “magical”, but this is the word that comes to mind for describing this place. I felt like we had been magically transported into a traditional Chinese painting.
The experience of trekking in Tibetan Sichuan was like being invited to a unique kind of indigenous cultural time travel zone. We got to be part of the Tibetan life because we were hiking in the area that our guide was from and he knew everyone, and most of the people we met were related to him. The Tibetan guides really took care of us. They lifted us onto horses, served us yak butter tea, covered us with yak wool when we looked cold, and chanted us into calmness and security. There is so much to say about our Tibetan trek, but for now I will concentrate on the alpine wildflowers. Dai Ou, our good Chinese friend, did much of the organizing for this adventure. She and I had a wonderful time picking flowers. I would see something that was similar to an American wildflower and tell Dai Ou the English name. Then Dai Ou would do the same in Chinese. Simple pleasures!
