Foliage

日本語に、英語の　foliage 　に値する言葉のないけど、これは何故だろう。

The word foliage is defined as “leaves of a plant, collectively.” Physically, it is a collection of leaves of the same tree, shrub, or plant of any kind with leaves. Visually, it is the entity in which leaves are not individually recognized. So, in a distant view, foliage is a total effect, a mass of color without individual leaves, like clouds, as any landscape artist draws or paints without thinking -- a purely optical phenomenon.  This was first observed and recognized in the West by Leonardo da Vinci, who drew the foliage of distant trees as a blur of quick horizontal strokes in his pen-and-ink landscape drawing of the Arno Valley, which he signed and dated (5 August 1482).  Chinese painters understood this earlier, first by Fan Kuan in his  renowned Travelers by Streams and Mountains (ca. 1000) and in subsequent centuries; and Japanese artists imitated them much later.

So, it befuddles me that Chinese and Japanese lack the word that corresponds to foliage in their vocabulary.  Both the Chinese and Japanese dictionaries give us the phrase that corresponds to the English dictionary definition: collection of leaves, i.e., 群叶 qún yè, or 群葉 gunyô, or else, simply leaves.

Foliage is called a collective noun.  But it differs from those collective nouns that refer to groups of items which are physically so identified with their components distinctly recognized, like flock (of sheep), herd (of cows), gaggle (of geese), school (of fish), fleet (of ships), etc. Then, there are those in which the word specifically refers to the whole as a unit or mass and blurs the individual components, examples of which are litter, faggot, plumage, bouquet, etc., and their Japanese counterparts give us definitions.  Furniture is expressed as 家具一式 kagu isshiki, or literally, a collection of pieces of furniture; and it’s similarly 一應家具 yi ying jia jú in Chinese.

Spring foliage in Japanese comes out as 春の青葉 haru no aoba, i.e., green leaves of the spring; autumn foliage as  秋の紅葉 aki no kôyô, i.e., red autumn leaves.

So, there is no word in Japanese that corresponds to the English word foliage, and I wonder why.  This comment is inconclusive; but I’m a bit bothered.