April 14, 2025
Daily Life

Confetti

Turning out of the Wood of Goodwill, the old broad juniper offers immediate dark green shelter from the cool spring wind. The labradors run ahead, tails waggling, along the narrow path before waiting for me at the point where the garden opens into a broader walk which leads further into the Secret Garden.

To either side are blossom covered cherry trees, impossibly entrancing and yet so ephemeral. In Japan, cherry trees and blossom may both be called Sakura – and “Hanami” is the many centuries-old Japanese practice of holding feasts or parties under blooming Sakura. Regarded as sacred, the trees have become landmarks in Japan and are associated with Shinto shrines and temples. One such tree is 2,000 years old and thus is far older and more venerable than we are, though sadly it is rare that they get to even a fraction of that age in this country.

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

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;

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.

Cherry trees bloom so fleetingly yet extraordinarily profusely. Their boughs seem to bend under the froth of flowers they produce although in reality the blossom weighs almost nothing. The slightest puff of wind sends the petals flying so that it looks just like confetti twirling through the air.

The amount of cherry blossom was traditionally used to divine how abundant that year’s harvest would be, whilst Sakura came to embody ideals both of impermanence but also hope and renewal. The delicate layered flowers are usually pink or white with single, double and semi-double forms and can have anything from a few petals to well over one hundred. Apart from a source of human hope, cherry trees are an important source of food for birds, insects and mammals.

During Covid the Japanese Embassy in London kindly offered us 21 cherry trees as a gift. Planted down at the end of the wild flower meadow, they are still young – slim and willowy but full of delicate promise. These young trees mark all our youth which is then subsumed by summer and finally by the snow not of cherry trees in spring but of the winter of old age.

One of the trees however is now already moving on into the next stage of its seasonal life and the petals scattered gently over the grass in front of me. The the arching branches are no longer dressed in white and the tiny petals were hovering and swirling away. It is both exquisite and somehow rather sad.

The tiny petals are nature’s confetti but the word confetti bizarrely has no relation to petals or nature: it derives from the word for Italian sugar coated almonds (the Latin confectum) and thus the French word confit. The connection comes because these almonds were traditionally thrown during carnival parades. Participants also threw eggs, coins and fruit an rather less welcome mud balls. Fortunately in 1875, an Italian businessman from Milan, Enrico Mangili, began selling paper confetti for use in the upcoming ‘carnevale di Milano’ which was a big improvement on rotten eggs.