that white plum blossoms should not be made use of when
snow lay in the garden. "Noisy" flowers were relentlessly
banished from the tea-room. A flower arrangement by a
tea-master loses its significance if removed from the place for
which it was originally intended, for its lines and proportions
have been specially worked out with a view to its surroundings.

The adoration of the flower for its own sake begins with the
rise of "Flower-Masters," toward the middle of the seventeenth
century. It now becomes independent of the tea-room and
knows no law save that the vase imposes on it. New conceptions
and methods of execution now become possible, and many were
the principles and schools resulting therefrom. A writer in the
middle of the last century said he could count over one hundred
different schools of flower arrangement. Broadly speaking,
these divide themselves into two main branches, the Formalistic
and the Naturalesque. The Formalistic schools, led by the
Ikenobos, aimed at a classic idealism corresponding to that of the
Kano-academicians. We possess records of arrangements by the
early masters of the school which almost reproduce the flower
paintings of Sansetsu and Tsunenobu. The Naturalesque school,
on the other hand, accepted nature as its model, only imposing
such modifications of form as conduced to the expression of
artistic unity. Thus we recognise in its works the same impulses
which formed the Ukiyoe and Shijo schools of painting.

It would be interesting, had we time, to enter more fully than it
is now possible into the laws of composition and detail formulated
by the various flower-masters of this period, showing, as they would,
the fundamental theories which governed Tokugawa decoration.