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There are times when my ignorance is more tangible than the clutter of artifacts that have become the foundation of culture.
Tanakaea radicans is one of the names that represent something tangible but invoke nothing but ignorance in me. Tangible
ignorance. I was gripping it tightly when I was attracted to the name on a label at an AGS sale, and shortly after I was attracted to the owner of the name and grasped it. Ignorance in one hand and the subject of that ignorance in the other, I made my way home in that strange state I sometimes experience when I look up a familiar word in a dictionary and come away understanding it better. I have since learned that it is a Japanese creeping shrublet, evergreen, with small white flowers in summer. It is the sort of thing I would have spent my life aware of without knowing in any way and it was chance that threw it under my nose. I am becoming more familiar with it though the ignorance remains as real. The AGS encyclopedia online says: "Clump to mat-forming spreading by rhizomes and stolons. Japan, on wet or mossy rocks in mountains in southern Honshu, Kyushu and Shikoku." In a blog in the Alpine Garden Society Victorian Group (2018) it says: "Tanakaea radicans from the Saxifragaceae family very rare in gardens and in woodlands of Japan of which it is native. The plant is dioecious meaning there are male and female plants, the female plant does not produce runners or stolons while the male plant does. The creamy white flowers are Astilbe like but only getting to approx 10cm high." Reginald Farrer says: "Tanakaea radicans is a most pleasant little Japanese plant for light rich woodland soil in a comfortable cool corner, where, if it is happy, it will soon throw out runners freely from its main tuft of fringed-looking elliptic-pointed toothed leaves, leathery and richly green, from which ascend in summer stems of 6 inches, ending in loose fluffy spires of white blooms like those of a miniature Spiraea." |
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| 24th April 2014 | ||
