Envoy ———— Haruaki Hanaki(20)
In late April 2019, when I was walking near the Nanhai Film Theater in Foshan, I found that the gentlemen planted at the entrance of a community were blooming just right, white flowers, pink flowers, safflowers, purple flowers, crowded with cuttings, hanging branches.
The gentleman is a climbing shrub, and its branches cover the roof of the gatehouse of the community, and the concierge is like wearing a hat woven with flowers, so that the community has the color of fairy tale.
According to the Flora of China, Junzi "produced in Sichuan, Guizhou and south of Nanling, and there are no wild records north of the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River." According to the "Three Auxiliary Yellow Maps" written no later than the Southern and Northern Dynasties, the Han Dynasty once introduced the seeds of gentlemen to the north, but did not succeed, "Emperor Yuanding of the Han Dynasty in the sixth year, broke the South Yue Andi Palace, in order to plant strange grasses and trees: ... Leave ten copies of the Quest son... North and south are different, and there are many withering in the old age. At that time, people called the gentleman "to keep the son."
The Jin Dynasty's "Southern Grass and Trees" first made a detailed record of the envoys, and the name was "Liu Qiuzi": "Liu Qiuzi, shaped like a gardenia, with deep ribs and two pointed ends, like a pear and light, and half yellow has been cooked, with flesh white, sweet as dates, large cores, and cures the diseases of babies and children." The South China Sea and the crosshairs are all there. ”
When the Northern Song Dynasty "Kaibao Materia Medica" included this plant, it changed its name to "Making a Gentleman": "Making a Gentleman, Sweet, Warm, Non-Toxic." The main children have five chancres, white and turbid urine, insecticide, and cure diarrhea. Shengjiao, Guangzhou and other states. Shaped like a gardenia, the ribs are deep and the two ends are pointed, and it is also like a pear and light. The text also mentions the reason for the name change: "It is said that Panzhou Guo made Junjun treat children alone, and later the doctor was called Junjunye." ”
The flowers of the gentleman are colorful, and somehow they will think that there are many kinds of flowers of this plant, in fact, there is only one kind of flowers of this plant - color-changing flowers. Each of its flowers is white at the beginning, pink the next day, red in the evening, and purple after three or four days, which can be called the "chameleon" in the flowers.
There is a pair of couplets that highlight this color-changing feature. Legend has it that during the Qing Dynasty, there was a small monk in jinshan temple who was good at pairing, and the prefect made a joint examination of him: "Make the gentleman's flower turn white and noon red and purple", and the little monk has a lower link: "Yu Meiren grass spring green summer green autumn yellow", with the three changes of color of Yu Meiren corresponding to the three changes of color of the gentleman.
According to the website of the South China Botanical Garden of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, although the safflower of the gentleman is beautiful and fragrant, it cannot get the favor of butterflies, and it can only rely on moths to pollinate. It has been observed that the long-beaked moth, which is active at night, will come to suck nectar, but it only chooses freshly bloomed white flowers. When the long-beaked moth sucks honey, it stops in front of the flower by vibrating its wings quickly, and extends its long mouth to collect honey, much like a hummingbird. The website of Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden says that the discoloration of the junzi flower may have been an evolution to attract daily butterflies to pollinate.
The Flora of China says that "junzi seeds are one of the most effective roundworms in Traditional Chinese medicine, especially for parasitic ascariasis in children." Li Shizhen said: "All insecticides are mostly hard work, but it is also different to make gentlemen and hazelnuts willing to kill insects." ”
So that the gentleman not only flowers are beautiful, the seeds are cured, the name is also elegant, people naturally like and love to plant. However, some people saw that there were vassals among the flower growers, and the Song Dynasty's anonymous "Gentleman's Flower" sneered: "The bamboo hedge hut takes advantage of the creek slope, and the flowers outside the red, red, white and white walls are flowers." Lang degame a gentleman, and at the beginning there was no gentleman to the king's house. (See Universal Library, Guangqun Fang Genealogy, vol. 98))
There are about 17 species of plants in the genus Junzi, and two species are produced in China, in addition to making gentlemen, there are also small flowers that make gentlemen. The Latin scientific name of the gentleman is Quisqualis indica, of which the name indica means "Indian", and it is also distributed in India, Burma, and the Philippines.
