As warm air from the south lets flowers bloom further north, it allows for reflection on Seoul’s aid to Pyongyang. The worse the tensions become, the greater the impact of aid on the international community and its beneficiaries.

It’s chrysanthemum season. Hampyeong in South Jeolla Province, famous for its butterfly festival in spring, is inviting flower lovers to what has been dubbed the biggest chrysanthemum fair in the country.

All across the country, people are joining in preparation for the event to cover a vast riverside plain with hundreds of millions of the mainly yellowish, strongly scented flowers. The official Chrysanthemum Fragrance Fair is scheduled for Oct. 20 to Nov. 5.

But I might miss it this fall. Instead, I would go and see the splendor of baerong flowers at Byeongsan Seowon garden in Andong, North Gyeongsang Province, one of the best sights of Korea’s fall. I should confess that baerong flowers have jealously caught my botanical affection in fall as the glamorous yet elegant red flowers have become increasingly visible around Seoul in recent years. The smooth purplish brown stems add grace to the tree.

The name “baerong” is believed to be the result of a euphonic change from “baegirhong,” meaning blooming for 100 days. This points to their defiance of the general notion of “hwamu sibirhong” -- few flowers remain red for more than 10 days. The baerong earned the flower language of wealth and honor. The Japanese call it hyakujitsuko, also meaning “hundred days red.”

Traveling in California recently, I noticed many baerong trees in private gardens and it was explained to me that the flower called “crepe myrtle” was one of the five most popular flowers in the state. A guidebook revealed that crepe myrtle with the binomial name Lagerstroemia indica originated from China and Korea and that it was brought first to South Carolina by French botanist Andre Michaux in the late 18th century.

In Korea, baerong trees, weak against cold, are naturally found south of Gyeonggi Province. A friend of mine living in Gwangju, Gyeonggi Province, planted two baerong trees in his tiny garden a couple of years ago, encouraged by an internet post by a successful baerong grower in Hongcheon, Gangwon Province, and the picture of a grandiose 100-year-old baerong tree standing in the old house of the Choe clan in Gangneung, Gangwon Province. Sadly, one of them died last spring.

Still, the baerong front line is definitely advancing northward. One sees so many baerong trees boasting the frilly, intensely red flowers with fallen petals covering the ground in apartment complexes, public gardens and suburban roads. The natural limit line has disappeared and nearly the entire territory of South Korea is being embroidered red with baerong flowers this autumn.

Why do the ubiquitous baerong flowers steal my gaze from cosmos fields, chrysanthemum gardens and the sunflower paddies in this fall? I don’t know any authoritative scientific study about this, but I suspect global warming is behind the spread of the red flowers. We have already witnessed the northward advancement of bamboo and persimmon trees that had been restricted to southern regions.

Climate change is not wholly bad in this respect. In the coastal seas, fishermen’s maps are changing as schools of fish move up following the warming currents. Cod and cuttlefish are caught in large hauls in the West Sea, away from their original grounds in the East Sea. We can eat swordfish at lower prices these days with bigger catches along the southern coastal seas.

I feel now is hardly the proper time to babble about the visual delights from the crepe myrtle flowers of autumn and increased availability of tasty fish while everyone in this country has a growing sense of an atmosphere of war. Extremely hostile words are exchanged between state capitals, mutually threatening total destruction, and huge missiles are launched on a regular basis by a regime that brandishes nuclear weapons across the border.

But I believe it symbolically significant that warm air from the south is pushing the beautiful flowers northward, while thinking of the current heated debate on the appropriateness of humanitarian aid to North Korea. The Moon Jae-in administration’s decision to provide Pyongyang with $8 million worth of relief for pregnant women and children has met strong objections from conservative circles here as well as criticism of its inappropriate timing from Japanese and US officials.

The Ministry of Unification says it has set no specific schedule for actual delivery of the medicine, food and other necessities which will be distributed in the North by the UN agencies of World Food Program and UNICEF. But, I am of the opinion that once the decision has been made, it is desirable that the committed goods be delivered promptly without waiting for any kind of positive sign from North Korea, which cannot be expected at the moment.

The more the situation intensifies with the North’s harsher nuclear and missile threats, the greater impact the South’s generous humanitarian aid will have on the international community and on its direct beneficiaries -- the poor women put to hard work even in pregnancy, their families and neighbors, the malnourished children and their caregivers in orphanages.

World media says the clouds of war loom over the Korean Peninsula and international spectators may be betting about how the situation will develop. The safest bet is a long stalemate with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un finding his nuclear and rocket arsenal useless in changing the status quo and the Korea-US-Japan alliance unable to force China and Russia to apply effective pressures on the North to scrap its weapons of mass destruction programs.

Admittedly, South Korea is powerless to change the situation militarily under the current circumstances, but we are in possession of a unique weapon that has a great destructive power on North Korean society. Supplies of food, medicine and a variety of good quality domestic-use goods to the North may relieve the Pyongyang regime of huge obligations to support its people, but they will build a sense of longing toward the South and distrust in their incapable but oppressive rulers.

As UN sanctions continue with growing intensity, every capsule of medicine and every bag of rice or flour from the South will be appreciated by the North Koreans. As they touch the aid items, they cannot but feel the freedom and affluence in the South just as we are endeared by baerong flowers blooming in new territories under warm breezes from the south.


By Kim Myong-sik

Kim Myong-sik is a former editorial writer for The Korea Herald. He can be reached at kmyongsik@hanmail.net – Ed.