July - Japanese Flower Calendar

Morning Glory - Asago

The beauty of a single flower is best illustrated by the Morning Glory, the flower for the month of July.

A single flower is often used in the tea ceremony to represent the spirit of the flower, an enjoyment of pure and simple beauty found only in the simple use of one flower. Morning Glory is a flower that has prolific growth and is known as 'the poor mans flower' for its abundance. The beauty of a single flower can be seen in the following story. The famous tea ceremony master Rikyu had for his patron Hideyoshi a ruler in Japan and he had heard that Rikyu had a superb garden full of beautiful Morning Glory flowers. He requested a tea ceremony and arrived in the garden, with any friends, expecting to see all the fabulous flowers rumoured to be growing there but there were none! They were all cut down to the roots, all that is, except one, and that one was arranged alone in the Tokonoma inside the teahouse, a bloom of perfection. This single bloom makes one think of the existance of all the hundreds of others, this is the spirit of the flower, the enjoyment of pure, simple beauty, today we would say 'less is more'.

Haiku for morning glory

A single flower

Of the morning glory

The colour of a deep tarn

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