Art of Ikebana Arrangement

Using Heritage Roses

Jiro Ogawa
The art of Ikebana aims, not just to arrange beautiful flowers in an elegant style,
but to fully grasp the unique characteristics of each of them, and further, the
influence of nature on the process of their growth, and to represent in the arranged
flowers. In other words, it aims to display the whole history of the plants, not just
their flowers, most beautifully. Spaces between the stems, twigs, and leaves are
left unfilled. They also contribute to the attainment of the above-mentioned aims,
playing their own roles in the proper construction of the whole work of arrangement.

Ikebana literally means flowers arranged in a vase or a basin. However, there are
works of ikebana without a single flower. Why are such works of arrangement called
ikebana? It is because the aim of ikebana arrangement is to find and represent the
life of plants there. In other words, the art of ikebana is an aesthetic representation
of the life of plants.

Cut flowers of roses are seldom taken up as important materials for pieces of
ikebana arrangement. The reason is that the flowers and the stems of roses seriously
lack in diversity, one of the qualities regarded as most important for ikebana materials.
I feel I am lucky since roses blooming on stems with different shapes are available in
my own garden, though this is not the case with most of ikebana artists today.

Roughly speaking, there are three types of ikebana arrangement:

(1) Rikka or standing flowers,
(2) Shouka or less formally arranged standing flowers,
(3) Jiyuka or free style arranged flowers
Among these three, Jiyuka, free style arranged flowers, are most popular today and
many ikebana artists try their hands on this type of flower arrangement. In Jiyuka,
the containers play an important role in the construction of the whole work.
The shapes and colours, and also the feel or texture of the containers, are playing
very important roles in outstanding works of ikebana arrangement.