Art of the Japanese Chrysanthemum at the Botanical Garden

“It’s wild, when you think about it,” said Francisca P. Coelho, the horticulturalist who oversees exhibitions at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx. “These plants love to be tortured. The more you manipulate them, the more they give.”

The evidence was all around her in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory: hundreds of large chrysanthemums coaxed from a single stem and precisely arrayed in serried ranks; countless tiny chrysanthemums, some no larger than a dime, shaped into bright cascades suspended from wire armatures; anemone-form chrysanthemums twisted around a piece of wood in a reinterpretation of bonsai.

It is Japan’s most revered flower. The kiku, to use the chrysanthemum’s Japanese name, is the central image in the imperial seal and the symbol of Japan’s monarchy, traditionally referred to as the chrysanthemum throne. “Kiku: The Art of the Japanese Garden” gives it the royal treatment, with eye-popping sculptural displays and densely planted beds that show off the full range of forms and textures. It runs through Oct. 27.

The whole show depends on a horticultural sleight of hand. Chrysanthemum season normally begins in late October or early November, but the garden’s schedule demanded an earlier opening. Kodai Nakazawa, a 28-year-old horticulturalist at the botanical garden who trained under Yasuhira Iwashita, the kiku master at the Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden in Tokyo, planned a stealth operation to trick the flowers. Beginning in August, a team of employees and volunteers shaded the chrysanthemums with woven plastic sheets every afternoon around 3, then removed them the next morning to let the sunlight back in. The chrysanthemums, confused, reset their clocks, and in early October, they burst into bloom.

“Kiku” unfolds in three stages, beginning at the Palms of the World Gallery, where two curved bamboo bridges, one carpeted with small white Unryu (Cloud Dragon) chrysanthemums, the other with maroon and yellow Fire Chiefs, span the reflecting pool. The bridges sound a keynote.

“I asked Kodai to come up with some of his own styles,” Ms. Coelho said. “The techniques and the skills are classical, but we wanted to get the plants to conform to our parameters.” Mr. Nakazawa obliged with a blend of purely traditional displays and innovations, like the bridges. Using the kengai, or cascade technique, he wove chrysanthemum branches into the mesh that forms the armature of the bridges, covering them in uninterrupted ribbons of color.

At the entrance to the long, narrow glass hall that holds the second part of the exhibition, Mr. Nakazawa used a similar technique to make two floral gates with anemone-form white chrysanthemums on one side, yellow on the other.

The gates open on to one of the grandest of classical chrysanthemum displays, ozukuri, or a thousand blooms. The name may sound like a fanciful metaphor, but it is not. In this horticultural tour de force, a single cutting from a mature chrysanthemum is patiently urged along, pinched back and tied until its proliferating branches offer up dozens upon dozens, then hundreds upon hundreds, of blooms. The current record, achieved by horticulturalists in Japan, is 2,300 chrysanthemums growing from one stem.

The botanical garden, with limited space, settled for more than 400. From a single cutting, planted in a five-inch pot about a year ago, Mr. Nakazawa nurtured a cultivar known as susono-no-Tsuki (Moon Rising from the Base of the Mountain) and applied the exquisite form of torture that chrysanthemums respond to. Coaxing, cajoling and disciplining, ejecting the weak and encouraging the strong, he bred a teeming colony of flowers, all emanating from the ur-stem, about the thickness of a forefinger at full maturity.

Eventually the entire floriferous plant, now enormous, was shifted to a traditional wooden planter known as a sekidai. Working with three colleagues, Mr. Nakazawa spent five days attaching the blooms to the tiers of an aluminum frame, concealing about a hundred understudy blooms behind the 432 members of the principal chorus, ready to step forward if a careless visitor should damage a flower. When the last branch was tied into place, the arrangement took the form of a hillside blanketed with flowers, spaced as precisely as a military regiment on parade drill.

“Kiku: The Art of the Japanese Garden” runs through Oct. 27 at the New York Botanical Garden, Bronx River Parkway (Exit 7W) and Fordham Road, the Bronx, (718) 817-8777, nybg.org.

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