Bertha or Oiran

[David Clulow]

Earlier this year I purchased a grafted plant with the label 'Bertha'.  I cut the top off and made some grafts onto mature rootstock and one flowered late last week.

and by natural light

this is the plant, you can see the grafts are quite high up

This is the photo of 'Bertha'

this is same photo with its Chinese name

these Chinese characters translate to:

You can see from the Chinese pronunciation that Beckham is virtually the same as the phonetic Chinese      貝克漢      Bèikè hàn, so where does Birtha comer from?            

          

​'Bertha' appears to have only 10 petals whereas my plant is fully double.  Has anyone else flowered his cultivar yet?  It possibly resembles more 'Oiran'

however this is 'Orian''s Chinese name:

and again these Chinese characters translate to

but look what happens when we translate the same characters from Japanese

The Japanese pronunciation of these characters is 'Oiran', perhaps the exporter thought that 'Courtesan' was too strong for our sensibilities !  To add to our confusion Mr Ko has the same photo as e-Bay #24. 

So what do I have?  'Oiran', 'Huākui', 'Courtesan', 'Beckham' or 'Birtha !!!

​

--

David in Venezuela