May flowers in front of my apartment building

Dokudami in front of apartment building

Dokudami (どくだみ) is one of my favorite Tokyo weeds. It grows on cinder block walls and sidewalk cracks. Above is a large patch in front of my apartment building in May. The roughly 2 by 5 meter strip is a never changing display of flowers tended by the residents; its wildness contrasts with the clipped hedge on the other side of the entry path and heavily pruned trees in the parking lot.

Here are some other May flowers, including what is called in Japan “American jasmine.” The middle two plants I do not know the names. The last one is Datura, originally from Mexico.

"American Jasmine" in May, in front of apartment building

May flower outside apartment building

Flower in May, in front of apartment building

Datura in May, in front of apartment building

Advertisement
4 comments
  1. Cong said:

    Dokudami is called “Rau Dap Ca” in Vietnamese. We use this herb in freshly made Cold Rolls :)

    cong

    • palmsundae said:

      Thanks, Cong, for pointing that out. I had no idea. This weed is everywhere in my neighborhood. Should I just nibble on some leaves? BTW, do you live in Japan? Thanks again for your comment.

      • cong said:

        No problem, you can find out more about it at (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houttuynia). I am living in Adelaide, South Australia – a bit hard to come over for dinner, I guess!
        Thank you for such an informative blog.

        Cong

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 736 other followers