Chrysanthemum

The chrysanthemum blooms late, in the cold of autumn, and so became the flower of integrity and quiet endurance — one of the Four Gentlemen plants of East Asian literati painting, associated with the Chinese recluse-poet Tao Yuanming and, in Korea, with the scholar who withdraws from office rather than compromise. It also stands for long life, because chrysanthemum wine and tea were drunk on the ninth day of the ninth month.

Its most famous Korean appearance is on twelfth- and thirteenth-century Goryeo celadon, where tiny inlaid chrysanthemum heads in white and black slip are scattered across bowls and maebyeong vases. On roof-end tiles and rice-cake stamps the flower is reduced to a radiating disc of petals that is almost geometric.

That radial symmetry is what makes the chrysanthemum useful as a pattern unit: it tiles in a straight grid without a visible direction. Vol.03 contains five roof-tile chrysanthemums and a cross-shaped variant, plus a grid repeat built from one of the tiles.