Plant of the Week
The Splendid Ginger
Latin: Asarum splendens
Two years ago, I was skulking through the isles of a local nursery when I
happened upon a perennial - an ornamental ginger - that was new to me.
Unlike most wild gingers, with their cute but small leaves, this plant had
large, marbled leaves that looked robust enough to compete with the weeds
that sometimes creep into my woodland garden. This Asian ginger warrants a
closer look.
Asarum splendens is an evergreen groundcover growing 6 to 8 inches
tall with thick, leathery, lance-shaped leaves that grow about 6 inches
long. The leaves are marked with large, irregular patches of silver on a
green background making them the most ornamental of the 75 species of
gingers so far described.
Wild gingers have a decidedly creeping form with flowers produced at ground
level so that only slugs and the most observant naturalist ever notice them.
In early spring, the brownish, cup-shaped flowers appear that are about the
right size to slip over the end of your finger. The fat tube ends in three
petals that flare out at right angles. The flowers of this species are
larger than the typical wild ginger.
The low growing wild gingers shouldn’t be confused with the corn-like
ornamental gingers we grow in southern gardens or to spice Chinese and
Indian cuisines. Our native wild ginger (A. canadense), with its
green, kidney shaped herbaceous leaves, was used extensively in native
American folk medicine but not in cookery.
This ginger made its way into the United States in 1978, when Richard
Howard, who directed the Arnold Arboretum in Boston at the time, was invited
to visit China after the Gang of Four had been deposed, and the new
premiere, Deng Xiaoping, began normalizing relations with the West.
Howard quickly realized this new ginger had potential as a garden plant
because the mother plant maintained in the Arboretum greenhouse was stolen
not once, but twice. Fortunately, a single division had been made and this
new plant became the source material for the plants the Arboretum began
sharing with nurserymen in the late 1980s. Naming the ginger has required
the sacrifice of a small forest to make paper for all of the various
technical names taxonomists have associated with the plant. At least four
names have been used to describe the plant in its short stay in the West,
but hopefully they are now agreed that A. splendens, the Splendid
Ginger, is the correct choice.
The nice thing about A. splendens is that it responds well to
cultivation and produces foot-long rhizomes each season. These rhizomes not
only permit the plant to spread fairly rapidly (for a ginger) but they
provide division material if additional plant starts are needed.
This trailing evergreen ginger is a perfect landscape plant for the
suburban garden because it is low growing, has easily restrained growth and
grows in the shade. It makes a dignified groundcover for the shade garden or
a showy specimen amongst other diminutive perennials.
They should be planted in a well prepared organic soil that can be watered
during the summer. I have seen no indication they are bothered by insect or
disease problems. It seems winter hardy throughout the state and should grow
as far north as St. Louis.
By: Gerald Klingaman, retired
Extension Horticulturist
- Ornamentals
Extension News -
August 2, 2002
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