In a sort of follow on from yesterday’s post, a question that I have sometimes been asked in school English lessons – much less frequently than ‘What food/sport/animal/colour/etc. do you like?’ – is ‘What flower do you like?’ Being a butch, manly, vigorously heterosexual, car-driving, sport-playing, meat-eating (okay, so I’m vegan, but you get the idea) kind of bloke, my mind goes almost completely blank at this point, not just because I am too butch, manly etc. to be interested in flowers in the first place, but also because, like any word for a colour that isn’t primary, secondary, black, white, or grey, I don’t have the vocabulary, either in English or Japanese. Okay, so I’m exaggerating ever so slightly, but in the same way that I should but don’t have a stock answer prepared in response to the question ‘What has surprised you about Japan?’ I also don’t get asked about flowers nearly often enough to think of one in the high-pressure context of, for example, a seminar about British culture in front of a group of 12 year olds.
That is, I didn’t before, but I do now, and that favourite flower is called shibazakura in Japanese and (thank you, Wikipedia) Phlox subulata the creeping phlox, moss phlox, moss pink or mountain phlox in English. Shibazakura (芝桜) literally means ‘lawn cherry blossom,’ which I think is very appropriate, as it stays very close to the ground and comes in several pretty colours, a kind of shocking pink being the most recognisable and popular.
It’s also incredibly easy to grow, so ideal for someone like me, who has neither the time nor the ability to make a proper go of gardening. The shibazakura in this picture was purchased cut-price at the tail end of the shibazakura season (somewhere around April/May) about five years ago, and apart from weeding around it two or three times a year, it hasn’t required me to do anything else in terms of maintenance, and keeps flowering (sometimes off-season) again and again.
So, if you have a spare patch of ground at your own place of residence – even if it’s dry, gravelly, and doesn’t seem like the kind of location that would support any kind of plant life apart from an ugly weed or two – I highly recommend planting some shibazakura. Skinflints such as myself will also be pleased to hear that it only costs about 100 yen for a small pot’s worth, so you can buy a selection of colours for less than the cost of a Big Mac and fries.
