“Gray’s work showed that Darwin was right about the transmutation of species,” wrote A. Hunter Dupree,author of “Asa Gray: American Botanist, Friend of Darwin.”
This was all very interesting botanical brainstorming, but to get long-lost Japanese plants into our gardens, something else had to happen.
Enter Commodore Matthew Perry and the U.S. Navy. Or, more precisely, enter Commodore Perry entering Edo Bay with four vessels, two of them coal-fired steamers that appeared as menacing dragons. The conversation went something like this: “Enough of this isolation nonsense.” Perry returned eight months later and negotiated a treaty.
Almost immediately, plant collectors arrived from America and Europe to capitalize on the pent-up demand for the Japanese plants.
In the 1860s, an American living in Yokohama, George Hall, sent back seeds and plants of ornamentals, including Japanese maples, yew and false cypress. Others brought back Boston ivy, Japanese hemlock and dogwood. A Scots American named Thomas Hogg returned with stewartias, snowbells and katsura.
Within 30 years, the floodgates of Japanese flora were fully open. Japan, now in its Meiji Restoration, repudiated its feudal past, embraced Western science and technology, and created an industrialized society.
The Meiji government invited hundreds of foreign specialists “to teach production and marketing procedures,” as well as to establish their own Japanese-based nurseries, according to Thomas Elias, an expert on Japanese horticulture and former director of the National Arboretum.
Elias wrote in a scientific paper published in 2005 that four Japanese nurserymen established the Yokohama Nursery Co., in 1890, which became a leading exporter of Japanese plants, seeds and bulbs to the United States.
***
I ventured to the Special Collections room at the National Agricultural Library, a lonely-looking high-rise where the Capital Beltway glances Route 1 in Beltsville.
Donning another pair of white gloves, I carefully removed the documents from their protective brown envelopes. The contents are still mouth-watering for any green-thumbed gardener. At the time, they must have seemed a treasure chest of novel ornamental plants. Japanese apricot, magnolias, Japanese irises, witch hazel, cycads, bamboos and grasses, Japanese cedars, the list goes on and on.
F. Takaghi, owner of Tokio Nurseries, “begs to assure the public that his stock is genuine as marked and first class in every respect.” It took 30 days to get the plants from Yokohama to the Atlantic seaboard, via ship and rail.
Yokohama Nursery’s 1898 catalogue ran to 73 pages and included 77 varieties of woody and herbaceous peonies, 34 varieties of camellia and 24 varieties of azalea.
The 1902 catalogue, bound in red silk, featured an illustration of a Japanese cherry and is a thing of beauty in itself. It had grown to 80 pages, and its offerings included 124 varieties of chrysanthemum and 40 species and varieties of lilies. Lilies, showy, scented and providing valuable blooms in the heat of summer, had become wildly popular; by the end of the 19th century, the value of lily exports was three times that of all other plants, according to Elias.
Yokohama’s 1903 catalogue included a sweet and prescient if ungrammatical reference to the newly offered Yoshino cherry: “No park without this tree seems not perfect.”
This was a view shared by David Fairchild, an esteemed plant explorer for the U.S. Department of Agriculture who was in Japan the previous year and was struck by the beauty of the trees. He shipped about 30 varieties home for the department and in 1905 ordered 100 trees for his estate in Chevy Chase.
Their fame spread, and first lady Helen Taft was convinced they were the plant to use in her plan to beautify Potomac Park. The first gift of trees from Japan, some 2,000, arrived in 1910, but they were sickly and bug-infested and had to be burned. A healthier batch of 3,020 arrived in spring 1912. (The spread of Japanese flora has not been without its problems, particularly with plants that became invasive: among them, Japanese honeysuckle, the paulownia tree and kudzu.)
In 1914 and 1915, Ernest Wilson brought back more flowering cherry trees, conifers and 50 varieties of Kurume azaleas that would transform the American garden.
Collectors returned to Japan after World War II. On the remote southern island of Yakushima, John Creech, collecting jointly for the National Arboretum and Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, Pa., found a species of crape myrtle named Lagerstroemia fauriei. This small tree had beautiful plant architecture, striking cinnamon bark and a resistance to powdery mildew. Hybridizer Donald Egolf used it to create a series of varieties in widespread use. The most common, almost to the point of ubiquity, is the Natchez cultivar.
I called the late Egolf’s successor at the federal Agricultural Research Service, Margaret Pooler, and asked her to show me what Japanese plants she was using in her breeding programs. At the National Arboretum in Northeast Washington, she led me into an unheated greenhouse where cherry trees had been coaxed into early bloom. Growing in large pots, their branches were covered in large, bell-like blossoms of the deepest magenta.
Since the current cherry breeding program began in the 1980s, she has introduced two varieties and is about to release a third. All three are the cherry tree versions of “American Idol” winners: Hundreds of competitors have been dropped along the way. It can take 20 years between making a cross and introducing a plant to the nursery trade.
What is Pooler looking for? Cherry trees that are disease-resistant, happy in poor soil, novel in size and flower color, and easy for nurseries to grow.
Around the Tidal Basin, Joe Krakora and I see perfection. Pooler sees possibilities. She has 20 cherry species and 400 hybrids growing at the arboretum, all ready to lend their genes to breeding programs that will continue for decades to come. Such is the bounty of Japan.
“I’m building on the work of Don Egolf, and people are going to be building on the work I did,” she said.
If Asa Gray were to return today, he would see in virtually every garden a reunion of his plants long separated but now together again, generating that joyful space beyond the space.
“We have Chinese plants and European plants,” said Forrest, of the New York Botanical Garden, “but if you subtracted any geographic source, none would be so missed by American gardeners as Japanese plants.”
Adrian Higgins is a Washington Post staff writer. To comment on this story, send an e-mail to wpletters@washpost.com.
The Post Most: LifestyleMost-viewed stories,videos, and galleries in the past two hours
Loading...
Comments