Plant-Watcher's Page

Botanical notes from the edge of the Kanto Plain

Some photo essays on the local flora, and other related material. Inevitably, this will always be incomplete. Even at best it can take a year to assemble a cycle of photographs, and then there's the missed opportunities, and technical fluffs, so I can only hope to keep improving the site piecemeal. I am neither a professional photographer nor a trained botanist, but unless otherwise stated all of the photographs and observations are mine. I would be very grateful for any corrections of factual errors, or other suggestions and comments.

Pernickety note: I try to use italics and suchlike consistently, but here most plants have English, Japanese, and Latin names, so generally I've restricted italics to the Latin. But I've probably not been entirely consistent. Sorry.

Higanbana
Lycoris radiata - the (Red) Spider Lily

Sendangusa
Bidens frondosa - Plant-Watcher's bane!

Wild azaleas
in the hills above Sano
Rhododendron kaempferi

Tochi-no-ki
Aesculus turbinata - Tochigi-ken is "Conker County"

Goldenrod vs. Susuki
Solidago altissima - Miscanthus sinensis - The struggle with an invader

Biwa
Eriobotrya japonica - The loquat

Megi
Berberis thunbergii - Barberry

Ginkgo (Part 1)
Part 2: Ginkgo origins
Ginkgo biloba - The maidenhair tree

Hanadaikon
Orychophragmus violaceus

How a paddy-field works
Growing Oryza sativa

Entries in jeKai

Another project I'm involved with is jeKai (http://jekai.org), a web-based Japanese-English dictionary. You'll need Japanese language support to read the pages properly, but here are a few illustrated entries I've contributed for plant names (the link is the Japanese name):

Fuji - wisteria - Wisteria floribunda
Dokudami - chameleon plant - Houttuynia cordata

Miscellaneous

A Reunion of Trees - How trees travelled the world: a review of the highly recommended book by Stephen Spongberg, of the Arnold Arboretum, Boston Massachusetts

Plant reference books in Japanese - Recommended titles, and how to buy them from Amazon.co.jp

Daffodils 2000 - my record of a year's daffodils

Ume, Japanese plum (March 2000)

Kaki, persimmons (October 2000)

A couple of photographs from the "Theme" series at the top of the Sano Gallery page. One day they might make new entries here.

Totally irrelevant

Spider!
Photo by Bob Talbot

... but a good number of visitors having searched for "red + spider + Japan" (or something like that), arrive here because of the prominence of "red spider lily" in the page description. My friend Stephen Carter in Nagoya keeps tarantulas, but doesn't know of any good spider sites on Japan in English.

But he's given me a couple of Japanese sites: a nice page of spider photos, apparently put together by the kids at Miho Elementary School, and a more serious chunk of Spider Data edited by Ikeda Hiroyoshi.

Home - Search - Site map - Japanese
Shop - jigsaw puzzles and maps from Japan

Back to Sano Gallery

Other departments
Brian's Bookshelf - Nature books
Photography
Web Stuff
My digital art - The Artofar-
Torium

External link Japanese garden database (jgarden.org)

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