Plants with a story that begins in Japan. This collection gathers the trees, shrubs, and perennials of Japanese origin and heritage, from garden classics refined over centuries to the wild species behind them.
In Japan they call the shrub tobira, short for tobira no ki, the door tree, because the cut branches were hung in the doorway at Setsubun to turn back demons at the threshold of spring. The broken wood smells rank, which was rather the point: bad spirits, like most of us, would rather not walk through a bad smell. The genus name is kinder and more exact, pitta and sporos, pitch and seed, for the resin that coats the black seeds and glues them to whatever bird carries them off.
For a week or two in late spring, the Chinese fringetree disappears under snow. Chionanthus retusus var. serrulatus is a deciduous small tree of East Asia, native to China, Korea, and Japan, and the great show is the flowering: dense, lacy, fringed panicles of pure white, each petal narrow and strap-like, smothering the canopy so thickly that the foliage all but vanishes. The genus name says as much, from the Greek chion, snow, and anthos, flower.
The Japanese clethra is grown for bark as much as bloom. Clethra barbinervis is a tall, tree-like deciduous shrub or small tree from the mountains of Japan and Korea, carrying somewhat fragrant terminal racemes of white flowers in summer, in the same sweet-scented family as the native summersweets. But the real distinction is the bark: smooth and polished, gray to warm brown, and exfoliating in age to a handsome patchwork that makes this one of the finest small trees for the winter garden.
Cleyera japonica was for generations placed in the tea family, the Theaceae, alongside camellia and tea themselves, and the resemblance still reads in the glossy, leathery, deep green leaves. Later molecular study moved the genus out of that family and into the Pentaphylacaceae, so the old tea-family listing has since been dropped, though the kinship of appearance remains. In the plant's native Japan the species carries a sacred weight few garden shrubs can claim: this is the sakaki, written with a character that fuses the signs for tree and for god, and the branches are cut for tamagushi, the leafy wands offered at Shinto shrines for blessing and purification. Small, sweetly scented cream flowers open in early summer, followed by berries that ripen from red to black.
This striking, rather upright gardenia is a Woodlanders introduction that has since become more widely available, grown less for bloom than for the boldly marked leaves. Each glossy leaf is splashed and margined in strong yellow, so the whole shrub reads as a soft fountain of gold and green, a rare thing among broadleaf evergreens and a bright note for a shaded corner.
Magnolia stellata 'Royal Star' is the star magnolia at its best, a hardy, rounded shrub that opens its first flowers at the very end of winter, well before the leaves, in a froth of white, many-petaled stars. Each bloom carries a dozen or more narrow, strap-like tepals that give a soft, feathery look, and the whole plant can vanish under bloom in a good year, sweetly fragrant into the bargain.
The Meiwa kumquat is the sweet one, the kumquat you can pop whole into your mouth and eat skin and all. A small, tidy, evergreen citrus, Fortunella crassifolia carries round, bright orange fruit a little over an inch across, and where most kumquats offer a sweet rind wrapped around sharply sour pulp, the Meiwa softens the contrast: the peel is thick and honey-sweet, the flesh only mildly tart, so the whole fruit eats like candy off the branch.
Grown for the leaf rather than the flower, 'Goshiki' is the most colorful of the holly osmanthus. The name means five colors in Japanese, and the spiny, holly-like evergreen leaves earn it: flecked and mottled with cream and yellow against dark green, and flushed at every new growth with startling pink and orange that slowly settles to gold and green. The species name heterophyllus, from the Greek for different-leaved, fits the whole clan, whose juvenile leaves bristle with holly teeth while older ones smooth to entire margins.
Among the false hollies, 'Rotundifolius' is the gentle contrarian. Where the species arms the youthful leaves with fierce holly spines, this old form lays them down entirely: the leaves are small, thick, and rounded, nearly circular and spineless, a heavy, puckered dark green that reads more like boxwood or a miniature bergenia than an osmanthus. The oddity is the whole appeal, a curiosity that stops a plantsman mid-path.
Polygonatum odoratum 'Variegatum', the variegated Solomon's seal, is one of the most graceful of all shade perennials, an Old World cousin of the native Solomon's seals grown for luminous, cream-edged foliage on arching stems. Each lance-shaped leaf carries a soft green center rimmed and streaked in creamy white, and the new stems flush a warm rose before greening.
Hardiness
Zones 4–9
Light
Part Shade / Full Shade
Height
1–2 ft.
Spread
1–2 ft.
Bloom
White
Plant type
Perennial
Traditional use
respiratory support, pain relief, digestive health, general wellness
Prunus japonica, the Japanese bush cherry or Japanese almond-cherry, is a compact deciduous shrub grown for an early flood of delicate pink-to-white bloom. Wiry branches carry dense clusters of five-petaled flowers just as the leaves appear, wrapping the low, rounded frame in soft color in early to mid spring.
Prunus mume, the Japanese flowering apricot, is one of the most beloved of all winter-flowering trees, opening almond-scented blossoms in the depths of winter, from soft white to deep pink, on bare branches while the rest of the garden sleeps. In China and Japan the mei or ume has been celebrated in poetry and painting for well over a thousand years as a symbol of resilience and the turning of the year.
Hardiness
Zones 6–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
18–25 ft.
Spread
12–18 ft.
Bloom
Pink
Plant type
Tree
Traditional use
respiratory support, digestive health, general wellness
Prunus mume 'Peggy Clarke' is a selection of the Japanese flowering apricot, a medium-sized deciduous tree grown above all for showy, deeply fragrant blossoms that open in the depths of winter when few other trees are in flower. 'Peggy Clarke' bears rich rose-pink, double, cup-shaped flowers, ruffled and fragrant, crowded along the bare branches in late winter and early spring.
Hardiness
Zones 6–9
Light
Full Sun / Part Shade
Height
15–25 ft.
Spread
12–15 ft.
Bloom
Pink
Plant type
Tree
Traditional use
respiratory support, digestive health, general wellness
Here is a salvia that wants what salvias are not supposed to want. Most of the genus comes from sunbaked Mediterranean hillsides, dry Mexican mountains, and dusty California chaparral, so that the very word Salvia is shorthand for full sun, gravelly soil, and a watering regime closer to neglect than care. Salvia koyamae, endemic to the cool wooded slopes of Honshu in Japan, breaks every rule, asking instead for shade, moist humus-rich woodland duff, and the cool morning light that filters through a deciduous canopy. This is, in short, the salvia to grow where hostas would otherwise go.
Stauntonia hexaphylla is a handsome, vigorous evergreen climber from the woodlands of Japan, Korea, and China, grown as much for glossy year-round foliage as for the famous fruit. The palmate leaves are cut into five to seven leathery, dark-green leaflets, held on a strong, twining vine that clothes a support densely from top to bottom. A member of the Lardizabalaceae, Stauntonia counts Akebia, the chocolate vine, and Decaisnea, the blue-sausage tree, as relatives.
Styrax obassia, the fragrant snowbell, is the bold-leaved cousin of the more familiar Japanese snowbell, a small deciduous tree from the mountain woodlands of Japan, Korea, and China. Where Styrax japonicus hides small bells beneath fine, layered branches, the fragrant snowbell wears large, rounded, almost tropical leaves up to eight inches across, and hangs long, drooping chains of white, bell-shaped flowers that carry a sweet perfume through the late-spring garden.
