Ikebana: The Japanese Word for the Art of Arranging Flowers

Elegance, grace, beauty and life

I love daisies, my sister loves peonies, and my youngest sister loves roses. We are women and we love flowers as the kindest features of the nature.

Photo by Anna Meshkov on Unsplash

My dear Japanese friends have a nice art and term for this naive creatures. Ikebana.

They neatly arrange flowers, an action full of wisdom, aestetics, compasssion and knowledge. This is an art and it’s name is Ikebana.

Flower arrangement has come to Japan from China together with Buddhism which desires to preserve life. Ikebana is not just putting flowers together in an effective way but a way that gives the optimal conditions at which flowers can live long.

Flowers have their own lives. They have a language and a way of standing as living creatures.

There are different and intriguing factors in arranging flowers according to Ikebana:

For instance, the colours of some flowers are considered unlucky. Red flowers, which are used at funerals, are undesirable for their morbid connotations, but also because red is supposed to suggest the red flames of a fire. An odd number of flowers is lucky, while even numbers are unlucky and therefore undesirable, and never used in flower arrangements. With odd numbers, symmetry and equal balance is avoided, a feature actually seldom found in nature, and which from the Japanese standpoint is never attractive in art of any description.

Like all branches of art, Ikebana gracefully tells us the depth and meaning of life. Even if you are not an Ikebana expert, take a different look at the flowers in your home now. Beautiful, naive and wise.