Thujopsis dolabrata 'Nana'

A dwarf form of one of Japan's legendary Five Sacred Trees of Kiso, the goboku no kinbatsu, a select group of conifers protected by feudal law for centuries, reserved for imperial residences and temple construction, where commoners caught poaching the wood faced execution. The species, Thujopsis dolabrata, is endemic to Japan and known there as asunaro, a name that translates beautifully and a little wistfully as tomorrow it will become hinoki, a nod to the tree's resemblance to the more revered hinoki cypress, forever almost but not quite the more famous tree. Thujopsis is the sole species in the entire genus.

'Nana' is the dwarf form, a Japanese garden selection old enough that no one is sure exactly when it arose, though Veitch and Sons Nursery in England introduced the plant to the Western trade in the early 1860s, placing it in the same wave of Japanese garden cultivars that arrived as Meiji-era Japan opened to the West. The plant grows as a flat-topped, bun-shaped mound, and slowly: real growth measures in inches a year, not feet, a foot tall and three feet wide after a decade being typical, and four to six feet across after twenty years and more the upper end.

The visual signature is the foliage. Each leaf is a thick, hatchet-shaped scale, the epithet dolabrata coming from the Latin dolabra, a hatchet, arranged in flat overlapping sprays that look from above like miniature glossy ferns or, depending on the eye, antler velvet, hence a cluster of English common names that include elkhorn cedar, staghorn cedar, and dwarf hiba cedar. Turn a spray over and the real surprise appears: the underside of every leaf is marked with a vivid silvery-white stomatal band, painted on like a brushstroke. In sunlight the contrast between glossy emerald above and silver below is the kind of detail that makes a visitor bend down for a closer look. In winter the foliage often takes on bronze or russet tones, especially in colder zones, before settling back to deep green in spring.

Best in part shade in the Southeast, though full sun is fine in cooler climates; in zones 7 and 8 a little afternoon shelter keeps the foliage from looking thin by late summer. Handsome in a Japanese garden, beside a stone basin or lantern, in the foreground of a woodland border, or in a large container, where the measured pace and slow architecture earn more attention than a faster plant could.

A plant for the gardener who has stopped buying for instant impact and started buying for what they want to be looking at in twenty years.

Additional photo courtesy of Oregon State University.