In most of Japan, safflowers don't actually reach full bloom until closer to late June — this kō's own name runs a little ahead of the flower it describes, one of the few places where the traditional calendar's timing and the plant's real schedule visibly diverge.
Safflower reached Japan via the Silk Road in the Asuka period, originally from Egypt, and was grown less for its appearance than for the deep red and pink dyes pressed from its petals — used in traditional textiles, and, historically, as a base pigment for lip rouge.
Coming into its early-summer season, prized enough that its name changes with size in classical cuisine — one of Japan's shusse-uo, "promotion fish."
Still hard and green now, exactly the state needed for umeshu — the full harvest for eating and pickling comes a few weeks later.
Looser-leaved and sweeter than the dense winter variety, good eaten raw in a simple salad.
Early greenhouse fruit reaches good quality now, well ahead of the field-grown tomatoes still weeks away.
Ajisai is only just starting here — its real season runs through the rainy weeks ahead, but the first buds and earliest blooms are already visible on healthy shrubs by this point most years, a preview of the flower that will come to define the coming month far more than the still-unopened safflower will.
From the mid-Edo period on, Yamagata's Mogami River basin became the country's premier safflower-growing region, its soil and climate suited to the plant. Alongside indigo from Awa (present-day Tokushima), Mogami safflower was one of the two dyes that supplied most of Edo Japan's traditional textile color — indigo for blues, safflower for the full range of reds and pinks. Safflower remains Yamagata's official prefectural flower today, long after the dye trade that made the region famous for it declined.
紅 (kurenai), the classical Japanese word for a deep, saturated red, derives directly from an old name for this same flower — the color was named after the plant that produced the dye, not the other way around, a small trace of how central safflower once was to how red itself got talked about.
The flower most associated with the coming rainy season is only just starting — worth noticing the earliest stage before it becomes the dominant color of the weeks ahead.
The classic umeshu plum should still be hard and green; if it's started to soften or yellow, it's moved past the ideal window for the liqueur and toward eating fresh instead.
This kō's name runs a little ahead of the actual bloom — the real display is still roughly a month out in most regions.
Its looser, more tender leaves are best used within a few days rather than stored for later in the week.
Safflower's older name, 末摘花 (suetsumuhana, "the flower plucked from the tip"), describes exactly how it was harvested — only the newest blooms at the very top of the stem, picked again and again as more open beneath them. The name outlived its original use: in The Tale of Genji, Genji nicknames a woman 末摘花 as a cutting joke about her unusually long nose, red at the tip like the flower — a label that had nothing to do with dye and everything to do with how she looked to him, and one that has followed her through a thousand years of readers who know her by that name and little else. What has someone else named in you that stuck, for reasons that were really about them rather than you?