310 t He F i v e Dy na s t i e s anD t He s ong Dy na s t y
the lunar calendar, may fall anytime between late January and late February. It is
not unusual, then, in much of China to have snowfall even after the plum tree has
blossomed. Chinese painters are fond of depicting the delicate white of the plum
blossom set against snow on the branches of the tree. As one of the “three friends
of the cold season” (the other two are bamboo and pine), the plum has long been
associated with a kind of delicate beauty that exists in, and despite, the harsh con-
ditions surrounding it. The fact that the plum blossom eschews the showy color
and heavy fragrances of other flowering trees has made it particularly beloved of
the scholarly class, which sees it as representative of the austerity and self-restraint
that are scholarly ideals.
Lin Bu’s poem stresses several characteristics of the blossoms for which they
are generally admired. They are singular, appearing at an inhospitable time of year
that has laid waste to other floral beauty; moreover, despite the season, their deli-
cate beauty is suggestive of warmth and romance (lines 1–2). Their appearance,
however, is not that of luxuriance or intoxicating beauty; the branches are char-
acterized as “spare,” and the aroma the blossoms emit is similarly subtle (lines
3–4). This second couplet is the one that has made the poem famous, evoking
as it does the beauty of its subject by deflecting attention to related images (the
shadows lying on the surface of clear waters, the aroma drifting in the air, the dis-
tant moon in the sky). The blossoms’ feminine allure is such that the bird flying
above cannot resist stealing a look at them; and if the butterflies (frequent figures
for male lovers who dally with “flowers”) realized that the plum had already blos-
somed, they would be smitten by its beauty (lines 5–6). Both bird and butterflies,
moreover, are marked by a whiteness that matches that of the blossoms. So de-
mure and elegant are the blossoms, in fact, that they represent an entirely differ-
ent sort of feminine company from that of the professional entertainer, with her
music making and wine serving (lines 7–8). We are meant to understand that such
pleasures would be lowly in comparison with those brought by viewing the plum
blossoms.
Lin Bu is an example of a minor poet who wrote certain poems that had a major
impact on literary, and even cultural, history. Because of “Small Plum Tree in a
Garden in the Hills, No. 1,” and a handful of other poems that he composed on the
same subject, Lin Bu came to be viewed as the patriarch of plum blossom poetry
in the Song and later dynasties. Soon, his influence spread beyond literature, as
the subject of the plum blossom was taken up by artists and became a staple of
the so-called bird-and-flower division of Chinese painting. Plum blossom painting
reached its most refined stage with the development of the “ink plum” tradition,
in which the real blossom’s avoidance of color was mimicked by the artist’s tech-
nique of painting the flower using only black ink—outlining the form with ink on
a white background. By the early Southern Song, ink plum painting had turned
into something of a cult among literati painters, who competed to produce more
and more delicate and ingenious images of the flower’s austere beauty. Ink plum
paintings, together with poems about either the natural plant or the artists’ ren-
dering of it, came to be produced by the thousands, for the image had become a