Description
Asarum asaroides itself is a slow-growing, evergreen, clump-forming species from the Japanese Islands of Honshu and Kyushu. It has 10-12cm long, pointed, blue-green leaves marked and clouded with sage green, pewter and silvery patterns. New, fresh leaves are made (only) in spring each year. In spring, the plant makes its lovely, carunculated, dumpy, flowers. In the normal form these flowers are purple-brown and they have a monstrous beauty to them.
It needs time to establish, don’t expect too much too soon from this one, it likes to get its roots down before increase is made but it is easily grown and not prone to ills. It likes a humus-rich spot, preferably in light or part shade and takes frost and survives temperatures which reduce other garden perennials to pulp. A touch of winter protection from the worst cold will enable the foliage to overwinter intact and plants in an alpine house will give you with attractive foliage throughout the winter and stunning, unblemished flowers in Spring.
Asarum asaroides Ohkuni Misho is a Japanese horticultural selection newly acquired, direct from a Japanese Asarum specialist. It has a large, olive green flower which is heavily carrunculated and wrinkled, around a mouth stained with Indian Red which becomes deeper and darker within the tube of the flower. The flowers are a good size and at least as large as the emerging leaves.
The species itself is slow to grow and propagate and this superb selection is equally slow. In addition it is a clone so it has to be brought on by division and not by not seed. As a result it is expensive, all the more so as it is virtually unknown outside of Japan and it is thus near impossible to procure in the first place, in order to be able to propagate it.
Asarum asaroides (the name means “the Asarum that looks like an Asarum”) was introduced to Holland and to western horticulture, by the German, Philipp Franz Balthasar von Siebold (1796-1866) , on his return from the Dutch trading post close to Nagasaki, Japan in 1830.
