From “Japanese Anemones” in A Family of Flowers: Clematis and the Ranunculaceae by Deborah Kellaway:
“Japanese anemones always start by sulking, and seldom think of flowering until they have lived for at least two years in a new place. But once they perk up, there is no stopping them. They grow in all directions, horizontally and vertically. Before long the small original plant is filling a square metre of border space and a dozen or more straight stems are rising from the handsome basal leaves until in August they are waist high.
“The plant grows from a tuberous rootstock which spreads out horizontally 20cm/8in below the ground. In spring it makes strong clumps of divided leaves, dark green on top, pale green beneath, incised round the edges and arranged in the typical pattern of threes. The strong brown stems branch and branch again, four separate flower-stems coming from a single stalk, and each of these flower-stems branches again into four or six, and finally there will be four to six flowers, each on its separate pedicel at the end of each stem.
“The seed-heads are so round they look like buds, but they are yellow, and the buds are mushroom-pink. The final effect is a mixture of buds, seed-heads and open flowers all enhancing each other; the sequence goes on and on, from bud to flower to seed-head, in a cycle that continues from August to October.”
From “Windflower” by Bliss Carman in Windflower: Poems of Bliss Carman, selected and edited by Raymond Souster and Douglas Lochhead:
Between the roadside and the wood,
Between the dawning and the dew,
A tiny flower before the sun,
Ephemeral in time, I grew.
And there upon the trail of spring,
Not death nor love nor any name
Known among men in all their lands
Could blur the wild desire with shame.
But down my dayspan of the year
The feet of straying winds came by;
And all my trembling soul was thrilled
To follow one lost mountain cry.
And then my heart beat once and broke
To hear the sweeping rain forebode
Some ruin in the April world,
Between the woodside and the road.
Tonight can bring no healing now;
The calm of yesternight is gone;
Surely the wind is but the wind,
And I a broken waif thereon.
Hello!
This is the second of two posts with photographs of Eriocapitella hybrids that very likely go by the name Eriocapitella × hybrida, from Oakland Cemetery. The first post is Double Japanese Anemone (1 of 2).
I opened this post and the previous one with excerpts from A Family of Flowers: Clematis and the Ranunculaceae by Deborah Kellaway because the book was useful for my earlier Clematis photos (see Clematis Abundance (1 of 3) and Clematis Abundance (2 of 3)) and also has a chapter devoted to Eriocapitella — though by their earlier genus name, Anemone. It can be a bit confusing, I think, when a plant has moved from one genus to another recently, and it takes a bit of mental juggling to remember that a book like Kellaway’s — published in 1997 — doesn’t differentiate between the two, especially with common names like Japanese Anemone remaining quite sticky in botanical literature and horticulture. It can help, in a case like this, to learn more about the plants from a current and frequently updated resource.
On Plants of the World Online, you can fetch distribution maps for most plant families, genera, and species. Below I’ve included its distribution map for the Clematis genus, followed by its map for the Eriocapitella genus, followed by the Anemone genus (originals here, here, and here). All three plants are members of the Ranunculaceae family, so share plenty of botanical (and visual) characteristics; but only two of the three have similar geographical distributions.
On these distribution maps, green indicates a plant’s native regions, and purple indicates regions where a plant is considered introduced. “Introduced” doesn’t necessarily mean a plant doesn’t exist in other regions, but reflects the extent to which a plant has been established outside regions where it’s known to be native. For a fine explanation of how these terms are used in botany, see What “Native” or “Introduced” Mean: Myths and Misconceptions — which elaborates on what I just wrote, and for the purposes of botanical history, anchors the definition of “introduced” on whether or not a plant “was present in a region at the time of European colonization of North America.”
The top and bottom maps — for the Clematis genus and the Anemone genus (which still contains a couple hundred species, even with Eriocapitella separated out) — show that the Ranunculaceae family overall has a nearly worldwide native presence. Eriocapitella, as shown on the middle map, has much more limited native regions (China and other parts of Asia) and has established well enough to be considered introduced only in Japan, some contiguous regions of Europe, and a small corner of South America. But it’s considered neither native nor introduced in North America, so its presence a mile from my house at Oakland Cemetery implies that it’s part of the history of plant migrations.
That kind of framing provides enough information to approach research with greater precision. In the book Restoring American Gardens: An Encyclopedia of Heirloom Ornamental Plants, 1640-1940 by Denise Adams, Adams describes the documented presence of plants still included in the Anemone genus as early as 1596; but treats plants like those I’ve been photographing separately. The plants we now know as Eriocapitella japonica, Eriocapitella hupehensis, and Eriocapitella x hybrida (all among those often described as fall-blooming Japanese Anemones) made their way to North America in 1844 and began their employment as border, accent, and container-gardening plants in nineteenth-century North American landscapes. Their repeat performances and presence at a place like Oakland link these historical threads quite nicely, reflecting evolving attitudes toward landscape design in that era along with the rise of Victorian-influenced gardens and Victorian garden cemeteries, as well as the cultural preference for “exotic” plants (often of Asian provenance) caught up in European and North American exploration and colonization.
I love it when a (botanical) story comes together!
Thanks for reading and taking a look!
