Eight fingers

DAY 61 (5 JUNE) – Fatsia (Fatsia japonica) (Farnham, England)

There was a time when you were a nobody if you didn’t have a cheese plant and a yucca in your living room (and preferably a weeping fig on the bend of your staircase too).

I’ve always really loved this giant ‘cheese-plant’ kind of tree in our garden, without ever knowing what it was. It makes a dramatic statement against the old walls.

So it turns out to be a fatsia japonica, native to (guess) Japan – and also South Korea and Taiwan. It apparently is most at home in temperate climates. No mention of the Surrey-Hampshire border.

In Japanese it’s called fatsude, which means ‘eight fingers’ because of its eight leaf lobes. But I was also interested to see it’s related to the ‘castor oil plant‘ I identified on Day 14 of this diary.