Aucuba japonica 'Shilpot'

There is a book about Aucuba japonica called A Virgin for Eighty Years, which sounds like a romance novel and is, instead, one of the strangest stories in horticulture. The species arrived in England in 1783 as a single female plant. Aucuba is dioecious, male and female flowers on separate plants, so for the next eighty years every aucuba in English gardens was a clone of that one original female. Gardeners knew the plant was meant to bear bright red berries, since reports came back from Japan, but Japan had closed its borders, no male could be had, and they simply waited.

Not until the diplomatic opening of Japan in the 1860s did Robert Fortune finally bring a male home, an arrival reported in Curtis's Botanical Magazine with the kind of fanfare usually reserved for royalty. Aucuba went on to become the great Victorian shade evergreen, pollution-tolerant, deep-shade tolerant, and tough enough that London street vendors sold potted plants off barrows. By 1914 the horticulturist W. J. Bean wrote that "for a bright and lasting decorative plant for rooms scarcely anything is so good." The Japanese name aoki translates literally as blue tree, a holdover from a time when one word covered the span that today splits into blue and green.

'Shilpot', sometimes sold as 'Pepper Pot' in Britain, is a compact male clone selected for foliage that looks as though someone shook a salt shaker of butter-yellow paint over each glossy leaf, a fine, dense, even speckling rather than the broad blotches of older variegated kinds. The pattern is precise and almost confectionary. As a male, 'Shilpot' sets no berries, but stands as the pollinator you plant near female aucubas, such as 'Rozannie' or 'Picturata', to coax out their dramatic red drupes; one male will serve several females within reach.

Compact and slow, 'Shilpot' stays near three to four feet tall and wide, a refined shrub rather than the rangy ten-foot specimen older aucubas tend to become. Excellent in deep shade, on the north side of a house, in woodland borders, courtyards, and dim urban gardens, and as a structural evergreen wherever fussier plants would struggle, tough in the way only a plant tested by centuries of British weather can be.

A plant for the gardener with too much shade, a Victorian streak, or a female aucuba sitting forlornly without a companion.