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 horticultural history. The species arrived in England in 1783 as a single female plant. Aucuba is dioecious — male and female flowers on separate plants — and for the next eighty years, every aucuba growing in English gardens was a clone of that one original female. They knew the plant was supposed to produce bright red berries; reports came back from Japan describing them. But Japan had closed its borders, no male plant could be obtained, and English gardeners simply waited. It wasn't until the diplomatic opening of Japan in the 1860s that Robert Fortune finally smuggled a male back. The arrival was reported in Curtis's Botanical Magazine with the kind of fanfare usually reserved for royalty.

The plant became the great Victorian shade evergreen — pollution-tolerant, deep-shade tolerant, evergreen, and tough enough that London street vendors sold potted aucubas off barrows as houseplants. 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 アオキ (aoki) translates literally as "blue tree" — a holdover from ancient Japanese, when "blue" (青, ao) covered the spectrum that today we'd split between blue and green. Aucuba is the green that the language once called blue.

'Shilpot' (sometimes written as 'Pepper Pot' in the UK trade) is a compact male clone selected for the way the foliage looks like someone shook a salt-shaker of butter-yellow paint over each glossy leaf — fine, dense, uniformly distributed yellow speckling rather than the broad blotches of older variegated cultivars. The pattern is precise and almost confectionary. As a male cultivar, 'Shilpot' produces no berries itself — but it is exactly what you plant near the female aucubas ('Rozannie', 'Picturata', the species itself) to coax their dramatic red drupes out of dormancy. One male will service multiple females within a reasonable distance.

It stays small — roughly 3 to 4 feet tall and wide at maturity, slow-growing enough to remain a refined garden shrub rather than the rangy ten-foot specimen older aucuba cultivars tend to become. Excellent in deep shade, foundation plantings on the north side of a house, woodland borders, courtyards, urban gardens with limited light, and as a structural evergreen in any spot where larger or fussier plants would struggle. Tough in the way only a plant tested by 240 years of British weather can be tough.

For the gardener with too much shade, a Victorian streak, or a female aucuba sitting forlornly without its companion.