I began buying flowers because of a story about Sen no Rikyū, a great master of aesthetics.
Toyotomi Hideyoshi heard that the morning glories in Rikyū’s garden were blooming beautifully and went especially to see them. Yet when the day arrived, every flower in the garden had been cut away. Only after entering the tea room did he find a single morning glory, quietly placed in a vessel.
The story made me wonder whether saying ‘less is better than more’ still misses the essential point.
Once the garden full of flowers had disappeared, the single flower before him seemed to grow larger. Not in size, but in how much it had come to carry.
We know that flowers had been blooming in the garden. Those we do not see therefore never disappear completely. We look at one flower, yet imagine an entire garden.
Much has been removed, but the meaning has not become smaller. Instead, the unseen part has increased.
The same thing often happens in art. Drawing fewer things does not necessarily create meaningful space. If nothing remains after something is removed, the result is merely empty.
The real difficulty is allowing the form to vanish while its presence—the ‘ki’—remains.
A person may be absent from the image, yet we can feel that someone had once been there. A forest may remain unfinished, yet we know there is still great depth behind the mist. There may be nothing beyond a single flower, and still the image does not feel empty.
As I look at flowers, I have gradually stopped looking only at the petals. I look at the space left beside a branch after it reaches outward. I watch how the weight of the whole arrangement changes when a flower head tilts slightly.
Sometimes there is nothing particularly unusual about the flower itself. It is simply the space beside it that allows it to become complete.
I believe that appreciating flowers is a form of subtraction worth practising.