thoughts of Japan

The flowers on Prunus mume 'Beni-chidori' are opening.  This is a lovely little cherry, with small but copious, single, dark pinky-red flowers.  I like it so much I have two.  The first was bought as a top worked short standard, which I intended to grow in a pot, and was left outside over the winter.  In its second year the branches suffered severe die-back.  At the time I was mystified, as I didn't think it was tender and we leave them outside all year at work, but then I read a comment by Stephen Lacey that this cherry was not the hardiest of trees.  My pot grown standard did start to shoot from the bases of the remaining branches, and has made a respectable new head, though the regrowth was initially terribly brittle and apt to snap off at the base if knocked.  The pot now spends the winter in the greenhouse, and is still in there, due to lack of forward planning packing the greenhouse last autumn that means the pot is behind a lot of Geranium maderense, and I never got round to lifting it out.  It has therefore flowered in the greenhouse instead of by the front door, but I enjoy looking at it when I'm in the greenhouse myself.  The effect of being under glass was to advance flowering by a couple of weeks.

Last year we had Prunus mume 'Beni-chidori' in stock at work as trees instead of top worked lollipops, and I could not resist getting one of those for the open ground.  This is now out, the little red flowers glowing across the garden.  My Japanese gardening friend told me that beni in Japanese means red, in particular lipstick red, with a connotation of old ladies, so I suppose akin to rouge in English.  Among older women putting on beni is an expression for putting on make-up.  I met my Japanese friend when she was doing an HND in horticulture as a mature student.  She was then already in her fifties, and I thought it took some gumption to go and live in England for three years, and sit in classes alongside English students young enough to be your grandchildren.  I have been thinking of her as I listen to the unfolding accounts of the earthquake.  She lives in Tokyo, so is probably safe, but to have been in the earthquake must have been terrifying, and how worried she must now be about her family, and her friends, amid the aftershocks, with destruction and chaos across the country.