Loveliest of Trees
by SealWyf, HSM editor
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Each Spring, A. E. Housman’s 1896 poem, of which this is the first stanza, constricts my throat with its beauty and implications. Especially now that I live in Washington, DC, a city famous for its cherry blossoms. We are wall-to-wall tourists these days, and the blossoms on the Mall have just passed their peak. And so another year has passed that I didn’t make it down to the Tidal Basin to gaze across the water at mounded cumuli of ephemeral flowers.
Even in San Francisco, I loved the annual spectacle of the cherries. The west coast city has a large Japanese population, and the Japanese, who presented the cherry trees to Washington in 1912, have a thing about spring blossoms. Hanami, the viewing of spring flowers, is a national custom. The recent arrival of picnic blankets in Home from Japanese developer Granzella is no coincidence — picnics and drinking parties beneath the blooming cherry trees are an important part of hanami.
Given Japan’s enthusiasm for their beloved sakura, I was pleased, but not entirely surprised, to learn that Granzella’s Japanese Teahouse personal space had been updated with flowering cherry trees. The space now has seasonal changes, as well as a time-of-day control and ambient music during the tea ceremony, but the cherries were the reason I finally purchased it.
As soon as I arrived, I knew my money had been well spent. The space is gorgeous, with that radiant, poignant natural beauty we know from Miyazaki’s films (especially Tonari no Totoro) and some of the Final Fantasy games. Looking at the blossoms, I seemed to hear Aerith’s theme from Final Fantasy VII. I was entranced.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
The thing about cherry blossoms — the reason they are simultaneously so beautiful and so emotionally painful, is their ephemeral delicacy. They bloom, reach their peak, and fade in the space of a few days, raining down like snow. Some years, the Spring rains batter them from the trees, and they’re hardly there at all.
And so, like all ephemeral, beautiful things, they remind us of our own mortality. In the second stanza of his poem, Housman’s “Shropshire Lad” muses that he can only expect to live to be seventy — since he is now twenty, he has only fifty more Springs to enjoy. Psalm 90 puts it even more bluntly:
The days of our years are threescore years and ten;
and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years,
yet is their strength labor and sorrow;
for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.
Seventy years is not all that long by modern standards. One can, with luck, extend the count to eighty or even ninety. But, frankly, after about sixty or so it’s all downhill. And, if Housman’s lad felt time flying away from him at twenty, how am I supposed to feel at 62? One more birthday, one more Christmas. One more blooming of the cherries. Which, once again, I have mostly missed. How many more chances will I have to see them?
However, Home has provided some compensations, in the form of the Japanese Teahouse garden, and its cascade of pink blossoms. And we have other blossoms as well. Granzella has just released a set of flowering cherry-tree parts — trunks and crowns — which can be assembled in private spaces to create very impressive trees. The full set of five items is only $0.99. That’s the good news — the bad news is that they are nearly impossible to assemble, since you have to stack the parts precisely on top of each other, and your view is obstructed while you are positioning the foliage. They are also too tall for many spaces, since the invisible ceiling of the habitable box gets in the way.
However, if you are willing to fuss with them, they are strikingly beautiful items. One trick is to drop each part precisely at a spawn point. This lines them up pretty well, and you can use a small heavy virtual item to nudge the top more precisely in line with the trunk afterwards.
There is also an older item, the Animated Cherry Blossom Tree, which was created in Home’s early days by Sony Computer Entertainment before they turned all item design over to third-party developers. It’s always been one of my favorite decorations. I use it everywhere, both in obvious garden settings and in spaces where you would not expect to find it. It’s on the terrace of my Granzella Paris apartment (the appropriately-named City of Flowers Penthouse). It works well in the Xi Continuum apartment. And it’s often the tree on the balcony of my Harbour Studio.
But there are two spaces where I use the Cherry Blossom Tree heavily, as the main decoration. One is the Chamber Apartment, which is such a perfect home for the trees that I have not redecorated it since I filled it with a cherry orchard nearly two years ago, during one of the Homeling Art Shows. The trees, with their showers of falling petals, turn this already magical space into a fairyland.
My other personal space that has been invaded by cherries is Konami’s Gothic Cathedral. My original idea was that the abandoned cathedral had been taken over by a group of magicians, who turned the side chapel into an alchemy lab and the nave into a fog-bound forest.
I have come to appreciate the power of animated fires and the LOOT Fog Machine to make any space magic. Adding a dense grove of Cherry Blossom Trees and a LOOT Drey Prop Black Stallion completed the effect. My alchemy lab has since moved out to free up slots for other items, but the fires, the fog, and the trees have stayed. And I think they will remain. I can’t imagine the Cathedral without them.
And so once again Home steps in to give us experiences, and emotions, we can’t have in real life. Perhaps beautifully-rendered cherry blossoms are a poor substitute for the real thing. But sometimes experiencing the real thing is impractical.
And, to be honest, as wonderful as the DC cherry blossoms are, the jostling, shoulder-to-shoulder crowds strolling around the Tidal Basin robs the experience of some of its magic. I’m glad I did it when I first came to DC. And I still have some wonderful photos of those earlier walks. But this year, I guess I’ll admire the more modest flowering trees planted along Connecticut Avenue, and the ones that slip past the Metro windows during my commute.
And then I’ll visit my gardens in PlayStation Home.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
April 30th, 2013 by SealWyf_ | 3 comments
SealWyf is a museum database programmer, who has been active in online communities since before the Internet, and in console gaming since the PS1. In games, she prefers the beautiful and quirky, and anything with a strong storyline. She is obsessed with creating new aesthetic experiences in PlayStation Home.
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It is the beautiful time.
I hope you get to see them enough Seal! I haven’t seen this yet, and will be getting on over there to take a look see. 8)
The cherries have come and gone. (The season is very short, and that article was waiting in the queue for a while.) But we are in the middle of dogwood and azalea season, so come on over!
The cherry blossoms are just beginning to make their buds known here. Although ours aren’t nearly as full as I’m sure the ones in DC are -- they’re much more of the wild variety. What is really neat though is that the cherry blossoms bloom late enough here that as they are passing, the lilacs are beginning to come into their own, which makes for a very fragrant, floral time of year.