Plum blossoms around Chiba - plus Basho & Thomas Wolfe

Yellow plum blossoms of the early 素心蝋梅 (soshinroubai) variety are already in full bloom, while the pink 寒紅梅 (kankoubai) are beginning to make a showing. The rest of the plum trees are covered in tiny dots promising to break out into flowers in the next two weeks. Spring is coming!

I enjoy the cherry blossom season in Japan, but I absolutely love plum blossoms. Plums are hasty and impatient--the first flowers to appear--yet distinctly elegant. With the exception of a few raucous plum festivals here and there (notably at Narita-san in mid-February), people walk around the cloistered plum trees quietly, reverently, sober. Here are some early pictures.

Yellow trees near my house and at Narita-san

Pink trees at Chiba Park and at Narita-san

In Japan, plums are graceful forecasters of spring. A Basho haiku helps set the mood:

Spring too, very soon!
They are setting the scene for it --
plum tree and moon.

In the American south, by contrast, plums are known more as fruit than as flowers. They are juicy and erotic, rather than dainty. This flowery (quite literally) passage by Thomas Wolfe reflects the feeling:

The plum tree, black and brittle, rocks stiffly in winter wind. Her million little twigs are frozen in spears of ice. But in the Spring, lithe and heavy, she will bend under her great load of fruit and blossoms. She will grow young again. Red plums will ripen, will be shaken desperately upon the tiny stems. They will fall burst on the loamy warm wet earth; when the wind blows in the orchard the air will be filled with dropping plums; the night will be filled with the sound of their dropping, and a great tree of birds will sing, burgeoning, blossoming richly, filling the air also with warm-throated plum-dropping bird notes.

--Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward Angel, Part 2

What do plums and their blossoms mean to you?