Azalean Moods.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20441, 20 October 1934, Page 10

Azalean Moods.

A Vignette.

Dual Personality of Shrub Blooming in the City.

[LIKE THE COLOURS that autumn paints in the city the azalea in springtime flashes against the grey of the old Provincial Council buildings and in other public reserves. For every year the shrub is growing in favour. But its colour is not all its charm, though colour seems to be exerting the strongest appeal now to lovers of flowers.

Some think the arum lily is the flower of purest form, with the grace of a Greek carving or a classic scroll, yet its pale perfection is ceasing to interest the taste of this generation and the painted lily has become more than a figure of speech in fashionable shops and homes. Artificially rouged with powder as it has suddenly become the vogue to treat the arum lily, it still lacks vivacity, and its stolid calm appears almost inelegant beside the witching loveliness of the more popular azalea, whether we see that flower in its white humility or in its gayer mantle.

The first time that I noticed the white azalea was in a cold dusk a dozen years ago. It speared into my consciousness and every spring brings back the prick of the first sensations it engendered.' It had a chaste virginity. Nevertheless, the seasonal blooming of the more voluptuous azalean beds in the Christchurch Botanic Gardens recalls the poignant flavour of those few white flowers.

The azalea delights in dry soil, but this one pined as a spindly shrub on a clayey bank whence the dankness dripped down after the previous day’s rain. Thotigh the flowers w-ere few they were perfect in their form and of unblemished whiteness, like the rare blossoms of a swamp orchid. They had the tenderest fragrance, cool and clean and yet intoxicating. It acted like Oriental incense, though it was not hot or sweet like incense. It was like spring and midsummer both; fresh as an English garden and exotic as Eastern mystery.

There is, indeed, this dual quality in the azalea. The Oriental element is apparent when it flashes into colour and becomes a cloth of gold embroidered with dragons, or burns like bushes lit to ancestral spirits.

The azalea is sometimes called false honeysuckle as though it had betrayed the promise of spring hedgerows and denied an English parentage, but its primal home is China, hence its inexplicable subtlety and glamour. Not all people are conscious of both these elements in the flower. To one the honeysuckle. To another the Chinese legend. And gardeners, I notice, will plant it in settings dictated by its peculiar appeal to them.

When the late Mr James Young was curator of the Botanic Gardens he massed the shrubs under a shelter bank of lilac and crab-apple trees. The old-world honeysuckle flavour here. And it was lovely. But when the present curator let his mind dwell on the same azalean border he pictured it through a filigree of magnolia and sumach, an Eastern trinity, which he has already planted in close association this spring, but which will not be seen in its full beauty till another year’s cycle has turned. B.E.S.