Cherry Blossoms/ Trees/ Orchards
EKS |
Closely related to other flowering trees of the rose family
with edible stone fruits, the genus Prunus
includes not only cherries but also almond, apricot, peach, and plum (Hogan
1091). All bear five-petalled flowers ranging from white to dark pink. Cherries bloom in the spring, after almonds
and peaches, but before apples.
Most of the symbolism and lore associated with cherry
blossoms and cherry trees comes from Japan where the masses of white flowers
are likened to clouds and, because of their short but intense period of bloom,
are seen as “an enduring metaphor for the ephemeral nature of life” (Wikipedia).
In Shakespeare the fruits appear most frequently in descriptions of feminine beauty
as in “Thy lips, those kissing cherries” (A
Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act III, sc. 2). [1] Their
significance in the Victorian language of flowers,however, seems rather dire. Folkard
declares that “To dream
of cherries denotes inconstancy and disappointment in life” (153). And while
Greenaway says that Cherry Trees in general denote “Good Education,” the White
Cherry Tree portends “Deception” (12). Another possible literary association
emerges from Chekhov’s play, The Cherry
Orchard, where cherry trees represent the sweetness and beauty of a
vanishing lifestyle.
Cherry
blossoms, trees, and fruit are mentioned nearly fifty times in Woolf’s life and
work, although the blossoms themselves appear only ten times.[2] Her first encounters with cherries produce happy
memories, but references to cherry trees turn increasingly somber. In May 1897,
she records “our great water party” when at the age of fifteen,
accompanied by half-brother George Duckworth, she and Vanessa rowed and floated
down the Thames from Goring to Tilehurst to Reading, picking buttercups and
eating cherries along the way (PA 89). In one of the clearest biographical links to
her fiction, Woolf repeats this scene in Jacob’s
Room, where Timothy Durrant eats cherries on the same river, also in May,
while Jacob lies in a field of buttercups: “as Durrant ate cherries he dropped
the stunted yellow cherries through the green wedge of leaves, their stalks
twinkling as they wriggled in and out, and sometimes one half-bitten cherry would
go down red into the green” (JR 35).
A first ecstatic description of the garden at Monk’s House in
a letter to Janet Case in July of 1919 includes “cherries, plums, pears, figs,
together with all the vegetables” in a list of notable attractions (L2 379). And
in April of 1935, she
records a trip to Kew and declares it was “the prime day for cherry blossom
pear trees, & magnolia” (D4 295). However,
a month later while driving through France with Leonard, she describes a more
foreboding scene: “All day we drove from Aix in wet straight unbroken
rain, mud coloured sky over us, & peasants standing to pick cherries in the
rain. Trees all red spotted with cherries—only just visible in the grey
downpour” (D4 315). Four
years later, an April walk in Kensington Gardens in the hail produced an even
more ominous vision of “cherry trees livid & lurid in the yellow storm haze”
(D5 216) that was so impressive that she included it in “A Sketch of the Past”
almost word for word: “all the cherry trees lurid in the cold yellow light of a
hail storm” (MOB 75).
Woolf’s
references to cherry blossoms in her fiction and essays show no familiarity
with Japanese traditions and instead tend to focus simply on the beauty of the
tree, often associating it with particular women. A prominent cluster of cherry
blossoms is found in her early story for her mentor and caretaker Violet
Dickinson, “Friendship’s Gallery,” where in the “Magic Garden” “gigantic women”
--Violet was very tall -- shake “cherry blossoms from a benignant tree upon the
face of a child” like a “familiar rain of crimson butterflies” (282). The third
chapter of this whimsical fantasy introduces two great goddesses, the smaller
of whom is “the height of a well-grown cherry tree” (294) and later is seen to
shake her blossoms and chime “as though each pink flower was a silver bell”
(295). In Orlando, another fantasy
biography written for a woman, cherry trees are among the many flowering trees
-- “Pear trees and apple trees and cherry trees and mulberry trees” -- planted at Orlando’s
ancestral home (81).
Another
notable cluster of cherry blossoms, which appears in the 1925 short story
“Together and Apart,” is less laudatory. The main character, Mr. Serle, attending
Mrs. Dalloway’s party, looks at “a youngish woman with fine white hair” (I
assume this is not Clarissa) and says to his female companion “She’s
like a fruit tree—like a flowering cherry tree” (CSF 191). However, a page
later the superficiality of Mr. Serle’s simile is revealed: “Roderick Serle
would go, perhaps to a dozen parties in a season, and feel nothing out of the
common, or only sentimental regrets, and the desire for pretty images—like this
of the flowering cherry tree” (CSF 192). Woolf had read Katherine Mansfield’s
“Bliss” with its famous flowering pear tree in August of 1918, and had judged
it a failure, recording her impression of its “superficial smartness” in her
diary (D1 179). I cannot help but wonder
if this is a slight parody of that rather over-heated flowering.
In To the Lighthouse,
published two years later, there is another curiously mitigated mention of
blossoming cherry trees. Lily is painting Mrs. Ramsey when Mr. Bankes strolls
up to take a look at her canvas. Although
she is embarrassed by his scrutiny, she attempts to explain what she is trying
to do with her abstract shapes and lines.
Mr. Bankes listens attentively but says he prefers more romantic and
representational art: ”The truth was that all his prejudices were on the other
side, he explained. The largest picture in his drawing-room, which painters had
praised, and valued at a higher price than he had given for it, was of the cherry
trees in blossom on the banks of the Kennet. He had spent his honeymoon on the
banks of the Kennet” (TTL 56). Cherry
trees are here associated with a past time of romantic promise and with
commercial taste.
These
examples of muted enthusiasm for cherry blossoms seem to chime with Woolf’s
reaction to Chekhov’s play, The Cherry
Orchard, which she mentions ten times in her essays, diaries, and letters,
seeing and reviewing it in 1920 and attending another performance in 1933. Much
of Woolf’s early review comments on the difference between reading the play and
seeing it performed. Interestingly, she faults herself for having had an overly
romantic vision of the play’s setting: “imagining an airy view from the window with ethereal pink
cherries and perhaps snow mountains and blue mist behind them” (E3 246). This does sound rather Japanese in effect,
but seeing the play gives her a greater appreciation for the reality of the
human emotions it encompasses.
In 1933, The Cherry Orchard was
staged at the Old Vic. Although she enjoyed the performance, Woolf thought it
was all too British -- “Even the dog is English” -- and asserted that “I
doubt if it is as great a play as I thought it when I was young” (L5 235).
Nevertheless, she appeared pleased when Maynard Keynes praised The Years as her best book; she recorded in her diary, he “thinks one scene, E. and Crosby, beats Tchekhov’s Cherry Orchard” (D5 77).
Nevertheless, she appeared pleased when Maynard Keynes praised The Years as her best book; she recorded in her diary, he “thinks one scene, E. and Crosby, beats Tchekhov’s Cherry Orchard” (D5 77).
In
1937, Woolf saw another Chekhov play, Uncle
Vanya, and recorded her reaction in a brief conversational sketch which
seems to encapsulate her view of Russian cherry blossoms: “Don’t they see through
everything—the Russians? all the little disguises we’ve put up? Flowers against
decay; gold and velvet against poverty; the cherry trees, the apple trees—they
see through them too” (CSF 247). It
seems that cherry blossoms are just one of the deceptions we put up against
decay. Written the same year, the short
story “The Duchess and the Jeweler” portrays the old duchess, conniving
to fool the jeweler into buying her fake pearls, weeping crocodile tears which
slide “like diamonds, collecting powder in the ruts of her cherry blossom
cheeks” (CSF 252), another fitting rendition of deception.
[1]
For more examples, see Quealy pp. 50-1.
[2] My
digital data base registers 87 hits on “cherry”; however, many of these are
references to lips and complexions ala Shakespeare; there is a cluster of
references to a character named Cherry Mant, in a book called September
that she reviewed in 1919, and ten references to the title of Chekhov’s play.
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