So many wonderful plants!
I’m currently on a walking trip in Japan that has turned into more of a walking-plus-bus-and-train trip. (Walking is great! Walking with all of your stuff on your back…is great for some people.) I’m on a pilgrimage that circles the island of Shikoku, visiting 88 temples along the way.
Because I’m a nerd, I’ve stopped along the way by some interesting-sounding local museums. One of these, the museum at the Makino Botanical Gardens in Kochi City, gave me a new mild obsession: Tomitaro Makino, who they call the “father of Japanese botany.” He was a taxonomist who discovered a lot of new species and gave many Japanese plants their new Latin names.
And he grew up, it turns out, in the town of Sakawa, where I found myself a few days later.
Sakawa is a sake-making town – the street leading to Makino’s childhood home is lined with breweries and you can smell the alcohol as you walk by. His family were successful sake brewers, and the family business helped fund his plant collecting. Their house has been turned into a museum about him – one of several museums in this historic town.
As a child, he dropped out of school and just did plants. Eventually he made his way to Tokyo University.
The town of Sakawa has gone all in for their Makino connection. About half the train station waiting area is devoted to him, with a wall-sized mural showing multiple Makinos (and tiny Makino fairies with leaves for wings) happily examining plants in a rich green forest. A mailbox nearby has a plant model on top. The big park is named for him. There’s a historical marker at the parking lot where his family’s brewery used to stand. Reproductions of his botanical drawings appear around town. (He made some of his own brushes, including some made of bundled mouse hairs. Mouse hairs!)
Behind the museum, 100 or so stone steps lead to a shrine perched high on the hill. I’m learning about the topography of Japan in a very direct and personal way on this trip. This is one of many steep climbs to religious sites that I’ve done in the last month or so. I learned in the museum that he liked to play at this shrine as a child, and did some of his first plant collecting there.
And oh, the plants! I can see how they would inspire a child. In this subtropical zone, it seems like plants are growing everywhere, wanted or not. The stone steps are host to lush moss, peppy little ferns, crusting lichens, and other photosynthetic friends that I can’t confidently identify. It’s been pretty dry in Shikoku so far this year, but the rain of recent days seemed to have brought everything to life. Water dripped from huge ferns. As I walked down the other side, fat iridescent blue-gray worms squirmed along the wet stone on my right.
Below the shrine on the other side was another museum, this one based on a library collection. The tree in the photo at the top of this post is out front – one of many cherry trees hosting healthy-looking assemblages of lichens and moss. The museum had two exhibits, one covering local history and some noted local people (including a leader in Japanese emigration to Brazil and the author of the 1903 English-language book “Plate Girder Construction”) and the other: Makino. It’s thanks to that exhibit that I can share this poem, which he wrote in calligraphy on a big scroll and which was part of his autobiography, published in 1956:
With grass as a bed and tree roots as a pillow, fifty years of love with flowers.
_____________
Photos: Helen Fields, obviously
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