Gardening : <i> Ikebana: </i> An Art Built on Nature : Teachers Will Demonstrate Japanese Flower Arranging
Etsuko Matsumoto doesn’t look for perfection when she walks into her Monterey Park garden looking for blooms and plants to use in flower arrangements.
If the edges of a green leaf are beginning to brown or the leaf has holes from a few hungry bugs, that leaf suits her--and the Ohara School of Ikebana she represents--just fine.
A natural look, one that depicts a setting from nature, is an ideal to be pursued at Ohara, one of five major schools represented at the ikebana exhibition today and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. at Union Church, 401 East 3rd St., Los Angeles, as part of Nisei Week festivities.
The exhibit by 25 members of the Ikebana Teachers Guild (Kado Kyoju Kai), from the Ikenobo, Ohara, Misho, Shofu and Sogetsu schools, ranges from traditional formal to present-day modern styles and includes works from several feet in height to smaller, table-sized arrangements.
Ideas in the Garden
But up until a day before any major show, Matsumoto usually has no idea what she or her Ohara colleagues eventually will create.
“Before I do an arrangement, I’ll think about what I want to do,” she said in Japanese. “I’ll have an idea, then I’ll take a walk in the garden to see what’s available.”
At this time of year, two favorite and available blooms are her miniature white daisies with yellow centers less than an inch in diameter, and what Matsumoto calls ho-o-zuki , or Chinese lantern plants, with orange, bulb-like blossoms about 3 inches in circumference around a small, black kernel of a seed (used as analgesic in some Asian cultures).
Both blooming plants were grown from 2-foot-long root cuttings purchased from San Gabriel Valley nurseries, but the Matsumoto garden also includes rarer specimens from Japan, some grown from seeds, others from cuttings. About 180 varieties thrive in a flat and sloping area in the yama-michi or mountain-view style.
It’s the greenery that Matsumoto depends on most heavily in the Ohara style. She began her garden because, while it’s fairly easy to find and purchase a few blooms at the local florist for her arrangements, she said, very few florists can supply, for example, suitable dieffenbachia, tree ivy or the gnarled branches of pine.
“Whenever I have root cuttings or a new plant, I start it first where I think it will look good and secondly where I think it will grow well,” Matsumoto said. “Then my husband will come along and see it and say, ‘No, not there! It will never grow there!’ and he’ll move it, often to a shadier spot. I don’t know. He’s the gardener. So far we’ve been lucky.”
Tsuyoshi (Bill) Matsumoto is a professional gardener who received his training after arriving in the United States in 1956. At the time, only one exponent of the Ohara School was teaching in Los Angeles, and Mrs. Matsumoto had been studying the Ohara style for nine years, having switched from the Ikenobo style in 1947.
Today, there are 96 students and four teachers in Ohara School’s L.A. chapter, and Matsumoto is only one of seven ikkyu --grand masters--in the country, achieving the highest of five rankings in the school in 1986. Each year, grand masters are tested in their art.
Always More to Learn
Despite her honor, Matsumoto said there’s more to study and learn, including the modern free-style techniques, and many other plants she would like to bring from Japan.
“The water plants do not do well,” she said, pointing to a small cluster of hydrophilics in a koi pond. “Today you can see many different types of flowering plants and greenery in Japan that you can’t find here.”
Various schools of ikebana claim that once students begin to grow materials for their own arrangements, their perception of the art form changes because, presumably, they see the growth process in their own back yards.
“To see how a branch and a flower reaches toward the sun, how it angles in its growth, changes how we perceive flowers,” Matsumoto said. In Ohara arrangements, one almost never picks flowers in full bloom for arrangements, choosing instead buds and semi-open flowers symbolizing the future rather than those depicting the present and past.
No Advance Discussion
Other ikebana students and Kado Kyoju Kai teachers who will have displays this weekend may visit Matsumoto’s garden to get plants for their arrangements, but true to form, no one discusses in advance what they plan to create.
“Everyone has a different idea, so there’s no duplication in our arrangements,” Matsumoto said.
Kado Kyoju Kai was originally formed in 1938 by seven ikebana teachers as the North America Japanese Flower Arrangement Teachers’ Guild (Hokubei Kado Kyoju Kai) in Los Angeles. At the time, it was unprecedented for instructors of so many schools to form a group to promote the art. In Japan, where cooperative societies exist today, such a move was considered taboo 50 years ago; each school had worked separately and exclusively as tradition had dictated for centuries.
During World War II, founding members kept the art alive while living in internment camps, using whatever materials were at hand--sheets of tin and salad bowls became containers and vases, weeds and desert sagebrush were used for greenery and nails pounded into squares of wood became the kenzan, or “frog” holders. Arrangements were displayed in barracks, classrooms and eating areas.
In 1952, the group officially changed its name to Kado Kyoju Kai and has since remained active, trying to introduce ikebana to the American culture through demonstrations and exhibitions.
All seven original founding members have died, but among visitors expected to attend this weekend’s exhibit is 98-year-old Katsuma Mukaeda of Van Nuys, a retired attorney who has advised the organization since 1935. It was at Mukaeda’s urging that the ikebana society formed in the 1930s.
As president of the Japanese American Chamber of Commerce, Mukaeda said: “To talk is not enough. Unless we appreciate the art and culture of each nation, there can never be peace and understanding.”
