International jet set plants

Japan jolly holiday pix, part 1

Oh we do like a bit of that Nihon goodness in this house. This Christmas was our 3rd trip to Japan, so over the next few posts I'm going to show you some of the gardening stuff we saw this time around. I'll look at the local vegetation & hard landscaping in the next couple of posts. Right now, let's set the scene & then take a look at some tropical regulars.

Where in the world?

As you may or may not know, Japan is made up of over 6800 islands. The archipelago stretches over a couple of thousand miles (give or take a couple of ongoing territory disputes), starting up by Russia, through Honshu where Tokyo lives, & running on down the Pacific Ring of Fire to just clip the top of the tropics.

This year we went to the Yaeyama Islands, a group at the South Western end of the chain, due East of Taiwan. We visited 4 jimas on this trip: Ishigaki-jima, Taketomi-jima, Iriomote-jima & Yubu-jima.

Climate

So, just North of the tropics means no frost & good positive temperatures all year round. But it was most definitely Winter while we were there, with the weather changeable & regularly stormy. But when the sun came out, it was glorious - shorts, sandals & sunglasses.

The international tropical jetset

We've been fortunate enough to have been on several sunny trips abroad, & I'm starting to notice that there are some plants that seem to follow us around on our holidays. Are they stalking us?

Bougainvillea

I think we've seen this plant on just about every trip we've had to a frost-free destination. 1st time was Tenerife, where its dark green leaves & its lairy magenta or orange flowers looked great against the white buildings.

For some reason I didn't expect to see it in Japan, but here it is:

Bougainvillea, pushing my camera to the limit

(Sorry about the photo quality - my camera really gets its pixels in a twist with vibrant pinks & reds)

The photo above was taken in the garden of the Guesthouse Iriwa on Ishigaki, and we saw this pink variety in gardens everywhere on the trip. Then, on Yubu-jima, there was a greenhouse packed with other colours too.

The Yubu-jima bougainvillea collection

The big blousey bits aren't petals, but pseudo-flowers made by specialist leaves called bracts. The true flower is the teeny white one, right in the middle.

Hibiscus

I tend to think of Hawaii when I see this flower. It's so pretty that it's no surprise this luau lovely has conquered the tropical world:

Hibiscus, in red, the hairclip favourite

We're all used to seeing the flower in isolation, as a motif on a sarong or shirt, or behind the ear of a beach babe, but the parent plant of this beautiful bloom is a shrub. On our trips we've seen it regularly used as the most glamorous of hedging.

The plant seems almost insanely willing to flower too - in Madeira, we saw a freshly planted hibiscus hedge that consisted of sticks barely 2 inches out of the ground, & one of these bare twigs already had a whacking great flower hanging off it.

It comes in loads of colours, some of which we saw in Japan:

Hibiscus, in a delicate pale pink

Hibiscus, in a much less delicate PIIIIIIINK!

Bamboo

The bamboo craze didn't only hit the UK, it would seem. The bigger varieties have been planted with enthusiasm across the tropics, & you can see why: statuesque, elegant, shade-giving, windbreak, plus handy construction material.

Best use I've seen was in the grounds of the hotel at Chichen Itza in Mexico - fabulous tall clumps of green stemmed giant bamboo were planted throughout the hotel's extensive gardens. Admittedly, they used a chainsaw to prune them, but at least they were never short of a fence post.

The variety below is from a little closer to bamboo's natural home, as the photo is from the grounds of another hotel, Painu Maya, where we stayed on Iriomote:

Big bamboo

Palms

Hot weather = palms: date, coconut, banana, the lot. No promo tropical beach shot is complete without a palm or too, preferably with a hammock strung between them.

Palm are so happy in warmer climes, they end up as the municipal default:

"We've got a long road with no shade... Best line it with palms, then..."

You know you're on holiday when you can see palms :)

Palm grove

So that's some of the familiar faces. In the next post or two, I'll look at some stuff that was new to me this time around.