THE JAPANESE ANEMONE

The Japanese anemone

With high summer temperatures just around the corner, most people's gardens are starting to run out of steam, and that includes many public and pay-to-enter private gardens. This is of course perfectly natural, after all, northern European plants flower in the spring. That way they have enough time over the summer to produce and ripen their fruit so that it is ready for seed dispersal in the autumn. As we all should know, autumn is nature's time for sowing seed.

Image credit - http://kootation.com/

However, one plant at least seems determined to create its own flowers show and that is the utterly beautiful Japanese anemone - Anemone hupehensis

Although commonly called the 'Japanese anemone', Anemone hupehensis is in fact a native to central China, though it has been naturalised in Japan for hundreds of years.

The species was first named and described in Flora Japonica (1784), by Carl Thunberg who had collected dried specimens while working as a doctor for the Dutch East Indies Company. However it was the great plant hunter Robert Fortune who brought this lovely plant to England from China in 1844. During his explorations he noted that he often found Anemone hupehensis planted about Chinese graves.

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