Yabukoji (Ardisia japonica): The Tiny Red-Berried Shrub of the Japanese New Year
In November, small pots of a low evergreen with glossy leaves and bright red berries start to appear in Japanese garden centres. This is yabukoji, Ardisia japonica, also called juryo. Many people buy it to decorate the entrance or the tokonoma alcove for the New Year.
We are a small tree care and landscape business in Mie Prefecture, central Japan. This page explains what yabukoji is, why Japanese people link it with good fortune, how a plant only a hand high once set off a speculative boom, and how to use it in a shady corner of the garden.
A shrub that looks like a herb
Yabukoji is an evergreen in the primrose family, Primulaceae. It grows only about 10 to 30 centimetres tall and spreads slowly along the ground, so it is easy to mistake for a herb. It is native to Japan, the Korean Peninsula, Taiwan and China, and grows wild in the shade of the forest floor.
It flowers in July and August with small, nodding white or pale pink flowers that few people notice. The berries ripen red in late autumn and stay on the plant through winter, roughly from November to February. Because the leaves stay green and the berries come when little else in the garden has colour, it became a plant of celebration.
The name means "citrus of the thicket". Koji is an old word for a small kind of mandarin, and the berries were likened to a wild mandarin growing in the undergrowth.
Juryo: the money plants of the New Year
Yabukoji has a second name, juryo, which means "ten ryo". The ryo was the gold coin of the Edo period. In Japan, several red-berried shrubs of the shady forest floor are named after amounts of money. The best known are senryo, "a thousand ryo", and manryo, "ten thousand ryo". Yabukoji is the humble ten.
Together they are sold in December as New Year plants, and they appear side by side in arrangements for the entrance. A pot of red berries and green leaves at the door is a small wish for a prosperous year.
A poem from the eighth century
Yabukoji appears in the Man'yoshu, Japan's oldest poetry anthology, compiled in the eighth century, where it is called yamatachibana, "mountain mandarin". One poem by Otomo no Yakamochi, written on a winter night when light thunder rumbled and snow fell over the garden, says, in our own translation:
In the snow still left unmelted, the mountain mandarin berries are shining red. Let me pick some and bring them home as a gift.
That picture, red berries against old snow, is still exactly how the plant looks in a Japanese winter garden today.
The variegated craze, and a bubble in Niigata
In Japan there is an old way of enjoying plants for their leaves rather than their flowers, called hagei, the art of the leaf. Leaves with white or yellow patterns, or with unusual shapes, were collected and given names.
According to the Niigata Prefectural Botanical Garden, variegated yabukoji became popular in Kyoto in the Kansei era (1789 to 1801) and spread to Edo, today's Tokyo. A hundred years later, around 1887, the fashion came back in Koume village, now part of Niigata City. During and after Japan's war with China (1894 to 1895), people expected a boom, and trade in yabukoji turned into speculation that pulled in ordinary townspeople, not only growers and collectors.
Prices peaked in 1896. The garden writes that a plant of the most popular variety, 'Hinotsukasa', three years old or more, sold for the equivalent of 10 to 13 million yen today, and that one pot is recorded as selling for the equivalent of 20 million yen.
The prefecture stepped in. In 1896 the governor issued a warning that farmers were neglecting their fields and merchants their businesses. In January 1897, Niigata Prefecture issued rules on the trade in "shikingyu", the Chinese name for yabukoji. Sales were allowed only to licensed dealers, and only in one area of Niigata City. The prefectural archives record that the fever cooled quickly, and that some people who had bet everything on the plant ended up separated from their families or fled their debts by night. The botanical garden adds that the rules were withdrawn a year later after local notables petitioned for free trade, and that yabukoji went on being bought and sold for years afterwards.
Europe has its tulip mania. Japan had a bubble in a shrub you could hold in one hand.
In the garden: a groundcover for shade
Yabukoji is a plant for shade. Long hours of direct sun scorch the leaves, so it does best on the north side of a house, under trees, or along a shady path. In gardens in Mie, it works well as a low evergreen at the foot of larger trees, where grass will not grow and where its red berries light up the darkest corner in winter.
In pots, water well when the soil surface has dried. In the ground, water for a while after planting; once settled, it rarely needs watering. It dislikes soil that stays wet, so plant it in free-draining soil with leaf mould mixed in. Spring (March to April) or early autumn (September to October) is a good time to plant or repot. It can be grown from cuttings of young shoots in spring and early summer.
Why the shop plants have plastic berries
Look closely at variegated yabukoji in shops and you may see a small label saying jinko-mi tsuki, "with artificial fruit". Variegated forms often set few or no berries, so growers add plastic ones for the New Year. Our understanding is that the white parts of the leaf have little chlorophyll, so the plant has less energy to spare for fruit. If you want real berries, choose a plant with plain green leaves.
A variegated plant without berries is still a good garden plant. It grows in shade where little else will, and its leaves carry more than two hundred years of Japanese leaf collecting.
