Ttukseom Trumpet Creeper Falls, an Orange Midsummer Wall
Summer in Seoul keeps a few things that flare briefly and vanish. None of them rouses the whole city the way the cherry blossoms do in spring, yet those who know go looking, season by season, for the short sights tucked out of the way. Trumpet creeper is one. It blooms for a month or so just before the monsoon, staining a wall orange and then quietly letting go.
The flowers run down the wall in orange, a cascade close enough to the real thing that the map marks the spot as Ttukseom Trumpet Creeper Falls. Other places in Seoul are known for the flower, but this is about the only one where trumpet creeper itself became the name on the map. For the few days a year the wall is at its busiest, the walk runs to the river.
Summer Spills Down by the River
From Seongsu Station it is twenty minutes or so on foot toward the river. The air sits heavy and damp ahead of the monsoon, and the sun stays sharp even as evening comes on. On the shadeless bike path the sweat starts long before the river does any good. Grey concrete, dry embankment, cars crossing a bridge in the distance. Every stretch looks much like the last.
Then, past the Hansin Apartment access gate, the view turns over all at once. The grey retaining wall that ran on and on goes orange in a single stroke. Trumpet creeper covers it without a gap, pouring over the deep green, and the flood does not let up however far you walk. Eyes dulled by the heat snap awake. The name earns its keep. A waterfall of flowers.
Up close, the mass that read as one color from far off scatters into single blooms. Open trumpets and still-closed buds hang together along the same vine. Trumpet creeper is a climber by nature, and in the Joseon era only noble households were allowed to plant it, which earned it the name yangban kkot, the nobleman's flower. You still meet it on the walls of hanok, old palaces, and temple grounds. A flower once kept for the privileged now takes a plain riverside wall for itself, whole. Rank was always a human concern, never the flower's.
Being a vine, the creeper spreads from the top of the wall downward. The roots stay out of sight; only the flow remains, spilling from above and pooling at your feet. The name must come from there. When the clouds part and the sun breaks through, a layer is added to the light: blue sky, grey wall, the thick green between, and the orange rising over it again. Four colors stacked in one frame.
You look up for a long while, and it sinks in that you are hardly the first to find this wall. Lower your eyes, and the front of it is already full of raised hands holding cameras.
The Crowd the Flower Draws
Where a flower blooms, people gather. The gathering runs a little differently now. Most come less for the flower than for themselves in front of it. Deep in summer someone's feed fills with trumpet creeper, and the orange on that screen pulls the next person to the wall, who shoots what they saw so it can pull someone else. A loop. At its center the flower simply blooms.
The footsteps here belong mostly to women. They come in twos and threes, lean in for selfies, and take turns as each other's photographer. One strikes a pose; the other crouches to find the angle, and they run it back, again and again in the same spot, until it is right.
A visitor on her own fills the time just as well. She stretches an arm out to check herself on the screen, tilts her head and rights it, shifts a step and stands again, and through all of it she stopped minding who might be watching long ago. There is a small courage in setting yourself down at your best with no eye for anyone else, and her back, lost in the work, is good to see.
Not every stretch of wall is the same. The creeper grows differently from spot to spot, thin in places, a full cascade in others. The favorite, by some distance, is a length where the vine hangs down like an eave. Under that shade, which filters the harsh sun by a layer, deep green and bright orange close in on every side. A small room with a ceiling of flowers. Two people stand inside it, photographing each other in turn.
When a couple comes, the photographer is usually the man. He regrips the phone, bends to the knee, fires off frame after frame, then holds out the screen for quiet approval of the keeper. There is something funny and, somehow, tender in a back that reshoots the same pose until the verdict comes in. For all that effort, once the two of them stand side by side, they look at the flowers rather than the camera.
The creeper spreads wide enough that no one has to queue or fight over a single spot. People pick a stretch they like and take their time. Only from a distance does the wall's full height register, and beneath a face several times taller than a person, the crowd shrinks small. That a single flower gathers this many footsteps is a quiet surprise.
Unfamiliar languages drift through. How they all find a place like this is a wonder, though anyone who has seen it once would not leave it out of a Seoul summer. The shorter a flower's bloom, the more sharply it divides those who saw it from those who did not.
As the Light Tilts, the Orange Deepens
Rain was in the forecast. The sun comes and goes behind the clouds all afternoon. Still, the moment the clouds break and the light pours down, blue sky and deep green and the orange between them come alive at once. With sun and without it the wall gives back wholly different colors, and over a stretch of clearing and clouding you see the same wall new, again and again.
Trumpet creeper full of light drinks the sun in. The petals brighten to their inner edges, and each bloom lifts clear of the leaves around it. Where the flat noon glare presses the color down, the low slanted light works in from the side and brings out the grain of every flower. The same orange becomes a different orange with the hour.
As the sun drops further the green dims and only the orange holds. From a distance the round blooms could pass for ripe tangerines. The orange dotted through the dark leaves deepens toward dusk rather than fades, and this is the hour when trumpet creeper looks most like itself.
The colors the world makes carry nothing forced. No one painted this orange or planted it to a plan; it fills a wall for one season and then, once the monsoon passes, goes as if it had never been. A month from now the wall returns to its unremarkable green.
Some colors run deeper for being brief. In the thick of summer, while one wall by the river runs orange for a little while, people hold onto that brevity each in their own way. Some by the shutter, some by simply looking up for a long time.
Reference
Open in Naver Map- Dates: Bloom season: Late June to mid-July
- Hours: Always open
- Getting there: About a 20-min walk from Seongsu Station on Line 2