Collingwood Ingram, the Englishman who saved the Japanese cherry trees from extinction

Exclusive Content

The note you are trying to access is exclusively for subscribersSubscribe

Learn about our plans and enjoy El País without limits.

Sign in

If you are already a subscriber you can sign in with your username and password.

This content is exclusive to our subscribers.On September 1, 1923, an earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale devastated the Japanese island of Honshu, causing directly or indirectly (by fires , floods, landslides, crime) the death of more than one hundred thousand people and damage to millions. The building reconstruction of that disaster, later known as the “Great Kant earthquake”, only deepened a phenomenon that had already been taking place: the westernization of Japan. Feudalism and the samurai, the geishas and the wooden houses were being left behind and in their place a different civilization was being prepared that maintained facades but neglected interiors.

No less carelessness affected the Japanese national tree: the cherry tree, whose varieties were beginning to disappear, especially in the cities. The reasons, in addition to the mishaps of nature, were several: a bad grafting technique; the fact that Japanese gardeners planted mature trees instead of seedlings; and that they planted them in the same places for hundreds of years. All this was realized by a man who was not a native of Japan and who was only there three times. In 1907 during his honeymoon, accompanied by a pregnant and not very enthusiastic wife, and only in 1902 and 1926, when he sadly noted that the cherry trees were diminishing in variety. This book by London-based Japanese journalist Naoko Abe tells her story.

His name was Collingwood Ingram: he was English, rich, obsessive and patient.

Passionate temperament

, favorite lapdogs of aristocrats and samurai. In the Ingram home at Wesgate-on-Sea there were thirty-five Chin. The property consisted of eight houses facing the sea and had been bought to escape an industrialized London that was not conducive to the delicate respiratory health of the youngest son of William James Ingram, a Liberal MP and newspaper editor. However, born on October 30, 1880, and died on May 19, 1981, Collingwood Ingram lived to be a hundred years old and had vast offspring. Financial well-being helped, no doubt, but also his passionate temperament and the fact that he turned his anxieties first to ornithology, and then, until the end, to the cherry trees.

Collingwood went through both wars: in the first he participated as a captain in the Royal Flying Corps and left it without trauma. There, too, he abandoned his fondness for birds and replaced it with cherry blossoms, which the Japanese loved as much as they despised roses. In 1919, already with four children, Collingwood had bought in Kent, south-east London, an imposing Tudor-style house with a generous garden. It was The Grange. In that garden he set out to plant all the varieties of cherry trees he could find, from all over the world, helped by several Japanese friends. From her favorite species (the Taihaku, with large white flowers), or the Yama-Zakura (she had the natural charm of a peasant girl, the Japanese said), to the one she hated the most (the Kanzan, with double flowers and purple pink; It seemed obscene to him and he compared her to a prostitute). Many of these aesthetic-moral evaluations were dictated by Japan, whose history and spirit had been imprinted on him since his first visit. Not even World War II, where the Anglo-Japanese confrontation was fierce, changed his feelings for the flower. In those years, Ingram worked on a monumental monograph that he would title Ornamental Cherries and published in 1948. It became the definitive guide to the cherry tree: the 129 species he described there flourished at The Grange. Some created by himself through hybridization, for example the Kursar. He was already known as "the cherry man" and yet the Garden of the Garden, a men's club sponsored by the Queen Mother Elizabeth (and later Prince Charles) did not admit him as a member until 1957. He was wealthy, but not a landowner. The niceties weren't unique to Japan.

National flower

Naoko Abe's book contemplates three instances scattered and linked throughout the story: something from her life and her parents' life, Ingram's biography, and the story of Japan associated with the cherry tree. To say that it is easy to read is a lie. It is not strictly chronological and it is not easy to absorb the amount of information it provides about the tree and its flower. Some data make noise, such as when he mentions the daughter of the "inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell", authorship that has been discussed for a while.

Still, the book is gripping, especially when it focuses on exploring the connection between the cherry tree and Japanese history. It was at the time of the Meiji Restoration at the end of the 19th century when the government of the feudal lords or daimyo was abolished and the shogunate was overthrown, business with the West was opened, compulsory military service was introduced and the cherry tree was imposed as a symbolic flower. of the Japanese spirit. In that spirit the samurai ethic remained alive. That bushido-guided military elite was still in force, only now the supreme loyalty would no longer be to the daimyo but to the Emperor. From there to willingly immolating oneself in a lost war was one step, and it was the one taken in 1944 by Admiral Tokijiro Onishi, creator of the special units of the Imperial Japanese Navy called kamikazes. Around 3,800 pilots died in less than a year in suicide attacks; on the fuselage of their planes, painted, there were cherry blossoms. In schools and in military training, they learned that one had to be willing to die for the emperor and for the nation, with the same lightness with which the petals of the cherry blossom fall after a brief and beautiful life. War poetry said it clearly: "For the glory of the emperor,/ what is there to regret?/ Like a young flower,/ life is worth more when it falls".

After the war, where once again the trees were leveled, Japan devoted itself to their recovery, but of the cheapest, fast-growing and easy-to-maintain variety: Somei-yoshino. Why was Collingwood Ingram's role so important, beyond his botanical contribution to the survival of ornamental or wild species? Perhaps he understood the simple value of saving and conserving something beautiful that was part of a tradition, regardless of whether its sign had varied throughout eventful history. Nor does it matter that in Japan the most hated flower was the rose, the national symbol of the United Kingdom. Take.

THE MAN WHO SAVED THE CHERRY BLOODES, by Naoko Abe. Anagram, 2021. Trad. by Juan Manuel Salmerón Arjona. Barcelona, ​​435 pages.