Download Megi Z
Cleopatra Elland
MegiBerberis thunbergii - Japanese BarberryTangled, very prickly, but attractive foliage (June 2000)
A few years ago, I encountered the bush above on a local mountain, recognised it, and took it home. Sort of forgot, and left it in the midsummer sun for enough hours that it easily passed for dead, but then I stuck it in the ground. It has flourished since, in its extremely thorny way.
This "volunteer" appeared at the side of our front path, sometime in 2000. (Photo: November 2000)
Full size (400x600 89KB)I recognised it as Berberis, of course, a fairly common shrub in English garden centres, and generally known by that name rather than the traditional "barberry" label. But no-one I asked seemed to know what it was called in Japanese, so (no web searches then!) I had to resort to that most unreliable of tools, the English-Japanese dictionary (Kenkyusha's Shorter), which assured me in print that it was a hebinoborazu (Lit. "snake-won't-climb"). Fine, except nobody seemed to have heard of that either, and I couldn't then find it in a Japanese dictionary. Eventually I think I saw one in a garden centre, and learned that it's megi (Lit. "eye-tree"), so named because traditionally infusions of the twigs and leaves were used as medicine for the eyes. It turns out that hebinoborazu is a particular variety, which grows in Western Japan, and has become very rare. (See link below.)What sort of plant is it? Well, it makes a highly animal-proof hedge, but such things aren't much in demand hereabouts. Generally it seems not to be regarded as a garden plant in Japan, and doesn't appear in gardening books. After all, it isn't very showy: the flowers are a beautiful creamy colour, but when they appear (April-May), hardly stand out from the greenery they hang under. The berries, which appear in late autumn, are bright red, but don't form really eye-catching clusters.