Woman with flowers
Wen | Chi Zijian
There is probably no woman who doesn't love flowers.
In terms of love flowers, country women have more luck than city women, they can plant flowers on their own garden fields, such as planting a row of golden sunflowers in front of the window, planting a few trumpet-shaped flowers in the corner of the wall, planting a few wind and fire cornflowers on the edge of the vegetable garden, and so on. Such flowers always breathe with the wind and rain. They can truly accept the light of the sun, and they can feel the sweet pain of butterflies and bees' tentacles caressing them.
How do women in the city raise flowers? They don't have their own land, but at most they can raise potted flowers on the balcony, azaleas, jasmine, chrysanthemums or smiles, glass greens, moon seasons, and so on. These flowers will also bloom, but because they do not bloom outdoors, they always give people a feeling of anemia, often only two or three days, the flowers are not spirited. And the flowers planted by the women in the countryside do not need to be treated at all, they bloom soundly and vigorously. Even if a chicken or dog shaves their roots, or if the wind bends their waist, they can stubbornly continue to bloom.
The city women who can raise potted flowers are lucky. Most of these people are prosperous, because there is no shortage of water to raise flowers, and watering needs people. For those who often go out, they can only raise flowers bought from the flower shop. Otherwise, you have a few pots of flowers at home, and when you come back from a month out, you will find them dead in the pots, looking like a mess.
The flowers in the flower shop are ordinary such as carnations and sword orchids, slightly better are roses and lilies, and the most expensive are calla lilies and tulips. Raising such flowers must use transparent glass vases, which can clearly see the location of the water, the green stems and leaves in the water, and so on. If you use a dense porcelain vase and can't see the stem, the flowers raised on it give people a sense of abruptness.
However, even if such a flower is pruned and watered every day, it is not as durable as the flowers that bloom on the earth. Roses will soften in three or four days. No matter how long the lilies bloomed, they could not be more than a week. If the carnation is done well, it can last for about ten days, but you prune it day by day, and finally cut it thin and small, the stem is short, the leaves are less, and a bunch of bare flowers are clustered together, there is really no beauty.
In fact, flower viewing is not only to see the flower itself, but also to see its stems and leaves. Therefore, the sentences written by the ancients to appreciate the flowers rarely express emotions on the flowers in the living room. Most of them go to the garden or the wilderness to admire the flowers, such flowers have the background of grass or mountains, with the embellishment of the moonlight, with the setting of flowing water, and only then do they have a sense of spirituality and beauty.
For example, Bai Juyi's "Looking for Guizi in the Middle of the Moon in the Mountain Temple, Looking at the Tide Head on the Pillow of the County Pavilion" in Bai Juyi's "Remembering Jiangnan", "Try to watch on the transcendent stage, half hao chun shui and one city flower" in Su Shi's "Wangjiang Nan", "There are countless peach blossoms on the creek, and there are yellow orioles on the flowers" in Huang Tingjian's "Water Tune Song Head", Tao Yuanming's "Picking chrysanthemums under the eastern fence, leisurely seeing the South Mountain" and so on, none of them do not express their feelings about flowers in nature.
In this way, the flowers in the living room are pitiful, they do not have the soothing of the breeze and the moon, they breathe the dirty air of the room that lacks oxygen, they feel the sunlight that wearily enters through the glass window, and they suck on the tap water with the smell of bleaching powder. Those of us who love to buy flowers in the city may use the sorrow of flowers to exchange for a pleasant state of mind.
Women love flowers, it is nature. I think the flower is also motherly, it is watery, delicate, fragile, gorgeous and amorous. These characteristics of it are not possible for men. These flowers also like women's soft fingers to caress them. And the fragrance of the flowers also nourishes the woman, and the tenderness and beauty of the woman are closely related to them.
I have found that the temperament of a flower in a place has a great correlation with the temperament of a woman in that place. For example, in my hometown of Daxing'anling, one of the most common flowers is the wild chrysanthemum. The flowers bloom from summer until late autumn when the frost falls. It was small, yellow in the heart, round, hard, like a button. And the well-proportioned, finely broken purple petals around the flower heart look so dense and thick. This flower is not afraid of wind and rain, very skinny, very similar to those women in my hometown, strong, stoic, quiet and simple. In the south, one of the flowers I see the most is the lotus flowers in the pond, which look moist, elegant and shy, very similar to those graceful Jiangnan women.
Of course, flowers are not always beautiful. There are also "flowers of evil". There are some beautiful flowers that are poisonous. Just like there are scorpion-like tigers in the female crowd. But no matter what, the world has a red flower, with all kinds of women who love flowers, the world is colorful.
Because of their love of flowers, women also like to have some beautiful dreams about flowers. I have seen a peach blossom larger than a bath in a dream, and I have seen a lily that can bloom hundreds of flowers. The flowers in the dream are much hotter than the real ones.
I think flowers may be the soul of a woman, and the bee is the soul of a man. When the bees buzzed and jumped from one flower to another, the flower remained quietly where it was, as always open.
Excerpted from Chi Zijian's "Chi Zijian Essays", People's Literature Publishing House, 2008 edition.
Wen Zi Shu Chi Zi Jian
Picture 丨Ya Qian
Audio 丨 Cold Moon
Beauty Editor 丨 Sun Li
Responsible editor 丨 Mao Yu