Gardening David Wheeler
TURNING JAPANESE
I have no strong urge to visit Tokyo.
Anyway, all thoughts of foreign travel are shelved for the time being. But I do yearn to see the flora of rural Japan and, if the crowds could be avoided, some of the temple gardens in smaller cities.
This horti-yearning stems from a late realisation that many of my longstanding favourite garden plants – hydrangeas, azaleas, hostas, maples, flowering cherries and many more – emanate from the Japanese archipelago, a 1,900-mile-long stretch of land incorporating more than 6,000 islands, including Hokkaido, Honshu, Kyushu, Shikoku and Okinawa. Each enjoys its own botanically propitious climate and a diversity of altitudes and terrains.
Distinct forms of hydrangea include the so-called ‘big leaf’ kind ( Hydrangea macrophylla), generally confined to Japan’s southern coastal regions. They bear either mophead or lacecap flowers, from pure white to deepest burgundy or indigo, depending on soil conditions.
The similarly hued, smaller-leafed H serrata is from mountainous areas and therefore hardier. The white, cream or blush-coloured paniculata types can make large bushes but are easily controlled by annual pruning.
The climbing H petiolaris can cover an expansive, north-facing wall in just a couple of seasons. All are mid- to late-summer flowering, some reaching perfection as late as September. Shrubby species delight in semi-shaded or woodland conditions, where they adopt a laxer pattern of growth, superior to those tightly formed examples that proliferate in exposed British seaside locations.
Spring-flowering azaleas also flourish in shaded places. They’re quite able during April and May to smother their deciduous or evergreen foliage with a profusion of trumpet-like flowers of red, orange and yellow – colours unknown to hydrangeas.
Flowering cherries have two seasons: spring for blossom; autumn for leaves of fiery countenance. A love and, indeed, care of them was touchingly portrayed by Naoke Abe in her recent book, ‘Cherry’ Ingram: The Englishman Who Saved Japan’s Blossoms. Collingwood Ingram grew many specimens in his Kent garden, repatriating several varieties to their homeland where they had become extinct.
Hostas are a new love. I’ve grown them for years, always troubled, alas, by their susceptibility to the mollusc brigade. Now I grow them in slug- and snail-deterring terracotta pots – mindful, though, of hostas’ excessive need for water, which such containers absorb. This is at least something I can attend to rigorously right now, thanks to lockdown.
I’m not crazy for the jazzier variegated varieties, preferring subtler leaf colours, especially in the ‘blue’ range, for example ‘Halcyon’, ‘Sea Lotus Leaf’, ‘Kingfisher’ and the diminutive ‘Blue Mouse Ears’.
Being no fan of the hostas’ prevailing wishy-washy, pale lavender flowers, I treat them as foliage plants, with the spectacular exception of Hosta plantaginea. It has an abundance of handsome, satiny, mid-green, ribbed leaves, above which, according to hosta queen Diana Grenfell, co-founder of the British Hosta and Hemerocallis Society, rise ‘very long-tubed, widely funnelshaped, exceedingly fragrant, white [flowers] on an upright to oblique, leafy, chartreuse, 32-inch scape from late summer to autumn’. The species has sported several superior forms, such as ‘Aphrodite’, which probably shows best in a warm shaded greenhouse.
‘Venus’ and ‘White Swan’ have double flowers. I will acquire them when travel and shopping restrictions have relaxed.
Japanese flora is superbly documented, thanks to generations of intrepid, literary-minded plant-hunters, botanisers, missionaries and travellers. I doubt I’ll seriously follow in their footsteps but, if I can survive the horrors of a 12-hour flight to Japan, I might yet step excitedly into one of the south’s floriferous hydrangea forests or sip a glass of sake beside a bosky-fringed lake – kanpai!