My tororo-aoi plants have started blooming.
One of the plants, about 40cm tall, in bloom.
The flower, about 6cm across, is pale yellow with dark purple in the centre. They look very delicate but are actually quite sturdy.
So far, only the transplanted plants are big enough to bloom; the direct-seeded ones are just getting to the point of thinking about producing flower buds, and the plants from the seeds from AliExpress are still only 2 or 3cm tall.
The flowers only last a day so you have to check frequently to get a picture. After that they close again, and fall off as the seed pod grows out. The seed pods look like the pods of okra, a closely-related plant.
The flowers and pods are not essential to the production of neri, but they look nice in the front garden. The bed on the other side of the front door has a stand of sunflowers, which grew from a combination of bird seed and seeds dropped from last year’s sunflowers. Beneath them is a thin stand of rose of Sharon seedlings.
Speaking of rose of Sharon (another more distant relative of tororo-aoi but still in the mallow family), mine are now in bloom:
The pink one on the right grew from seed, perhaps a hybrid of the white and violet ones.
They have quite a few more blooms now, a few days after taking the photos, but they’re already past their peak. Being in the mallow family, the sap of these shrubs is also slimy and could be used as formation aid, but because the plant is woody (both stems and roots), extracting any substantial amount of sap would be difficult. Perhaps I should try picking the seed pods before they dry out and seeing if they can supply some slime.
I just received an order of nishinouchu shifuyoushi sheets from Daisuke Kikuchi’s shop (Kami No Sato) in Japan – the sheets smell **just** like clean-scoured wool fleeces to me (I have hand-processed several dozen raw sheep fleeces in the past 5 years). I’m intensely curious as to whether the smell perhaps derives from the tororo aoi neri… if not, then perhaps from wood panels or perhaps an incense used in the shop Kikuchi-sama makes them in. I don’t speak more than a few words of Nihongo so far, so I was wondering if you could tell me if prepared neri smells like a light refined lanolin smell?
Glad to find another PNWer here – I’m in Seattle.
Autumn,
I have never noticed any odour from neri, but then it is generally kept cold and so I wouldn’t expect it to give off many volatile compounds.
The most likely source of any odour would be from the fibrous plant source (kozo, etc.) since that makes up almost all the mass of the paper.
By the way, I’m in southern Ontario, not the PNW, though I was visiting near Portland OR a month or two ago…