'I was walking one day at Yoshida with a Japanese artist, a remarkable man who was engaged in making a series of steel-engravings, half landscape and half map, of the country round Fuji, and called his attention to a splendid clump of pink belladonna lilies growing near an old gray tomb; but he would not have them at all, said they were foolish flowers, and the only reason he gave me for not liking them was because they came up without any leaves. When we got back to our tea-house he took my pen and paper, and showed me what were the seven beautiful flowers of late summer — the convolvulus, the name of which in Japanese is "asago," meaning the same as our "morning-glory"; wild chrysanthemum; yellow valerian; the lespedeza, a kind of bush clover; Platycodon grandi' florum, a purple-blue campanula; Eidalia japonica, the tall grass which covers so many of the hills; and shion, a rather insignificant-flowered aster.'
Alfred Parsons, 'The Time of the Lotus', Harper's New Monthly Magazine, December 1894, pages 51-2
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