荼䕷架 The Tumi and the Rose
逐句解 Line by line
The tumi trellis and the rambling-rose trellis, set close beside the swing-frame, all like a brocade bed-curtain and a gauze hanging;
The 荼䕷 is the tumi, a white rambling rose of the bramble family that flowers last of all the spring flowers — which made it, in poetry, the sign that spring is over. The second character is read mí. Setting the two flowering trellises beside a swing is a stock image of a women's garden, and the comparison to bed-curtains is the rhapsody being suggestive again. 著 is zhe, the nearness held in place.
the pine and cypress arbour and the magnolia arbour, facing the banksia-rose arbour, for all the world like a jade city hung with embroidery.
Three more arbours, and the same 著 as zhe for the facing. 木香 is the banksia rose, a climbing yellow rose grown over frames for its scent; 辛夷 is the magnolia. 碧城 — the jade city — is a dwelling of the immortals in Daoist poetry.
The tumi is the flower to know here. It blooms last in the spring sequence, so Chinese poetry uses it as the marker of the season's end — when the tumi is out, spring is finished. A garden that leads with it is a garden with an ending built into it.
The rare character in its name has turned up in this novel before, in the garden of chapter twenty-four, and it takes the same reading here. Unlike the character on the vermilion blinds, this one needs no special ruling: it is an uncommon character but a perfectly well-attested word.
And the comparisons keep sliding towards the bedroom. Trellises like bed-curtains, arbours like embroidered hangings — the rhapsody is describing a garden and reaching, line after line, for the furniture of a wedding chamber.