A Morning Glory Cult

Miss Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore has an article on "The Wonderful Morning Glories of Japan" in Theüentury. Miss Scidmore says: As a floral sensation the chrysanthemnm may be said to have had its day, the carnation is goiug, going, and seekers after novelty amoDg flower fanciers are sighing for a uew flower to conquer. It is hardly known, even to foreign residentes in Japan, that that land, which has given us so much of art and beauty, has lately revived the culture of its most remarkable flower, the asagao, our morning glory. For size, beauty, range of color and inimitable variety there attained this sunrise flower precedes all others until its cultivation has become a craze, which is likely to spread to other countries, and - who knows - perhaps there introduce the current Japanese custoin of 5 o'clock in the morning teas and garden parties. Asagao, the morning flower, is more especially Japairs own blossom than the chrysanthemum, which, like it, came from China as a primitivo sort of weed, afterward to be evolved by Japanese art or magie into a floral wonder of a hundred varying forms. We who know and grow the morning glory as a humble back yard vine on a string - a vine with leaves like those of the sweet potato and puny little pink or purple flowers - are as far in the floral darkness as the Chinese, who kuow it chiefly as a wild thing of fields and hedge rows, the vine of "the little trumpets" or the "dawn flower," that is entangled with briers and bushes for miles along the top of Peking's walls. The old poetry and the old art do not seem to be permeated with it, as iu Japan, where the forms of vases, bowls and cups, the designs and paintings of the greatest masters, repeat the gracef ui lines of vine and flower, and scores of famous poems celébrate the asagao in written characters as beautiful to the eye as is their sound to the ear. The asagao was brought to Japan with the Buddhist religión, that particular cult of early rising. Scholars and priests who went over to study the new religión brought back the seedsof many Chinese plants. The tea plant came then, and Eisai brought the seeds of the sacred bo tree, and Tai Kwan, the Chinese priest at the übaku temple in Uji, who may have introduced the flower to Japan, was one of the first to sing of the asagao in graceful outas, classic poems which scholarly brushes repeat today. "Asagaos bloom and fade so quickly, only to prepare for the morrow'sglory, " isTai Kwan's best known verse.