Question

Which plant is described by these clues? Thick leathery blades are set in {decussate} pairs up each stout shoot and are carried through the whole year without a general leaf fall. Each minute flower, barely 0.2 to 0.3 inch (4 to 8 mm) across, opens four dull purple-maroon petals that are free to the base, ten to thirty of them together in a loose branching {cyme}. The sexes sit on separate individuals, so a lone plant blooms every spring and never sets a single fruit. The genus name is a Latinised form of the old Japanese name for the shrub, built from words meaning blue-green tree and leaf. Its shoots are stout, fleshy, {glabrous} and bright green, staying green for several years instead of hardening into grey bark. Each glossy blade, 3 to 8 inches (8 to 20 cm) long, is edged with only two to four pairs of coarse teeth on its upper half and runs smooth below them. It grows wild in moist valley woodland and streamside thickets at the cool-temperate, frost-hardy north-eastern edge of its genus range, taking in the Korean peninsula. The epithet names the island country where Carl Peter Thunberg, physician to a Dutch trading post, collected the plant he went on to describe. Female plants ripen tight upright clusters of scarlet one-seeded {drupes} about 0.5 inch (12 mm) long that hold on through winter into spring. Its pounded leaves were laid on burns, swellings and chilblains in East Asian folk practice, and the wood was cut for walking sticks and pipe stems. It is repeatedly mistaken for Prunus laurocerasus and for Ilex latifolia, neither of which sets its leaves in opposite pairs. Brought to England in 1783 as a single yellow-speckled female {clone}, it was a fashionable shade-garden evergreen for nearly eighty years before a plant hunter landed a male from its homeland in the early 1860s and it finally fruited.

Accepted Answer

Aucuba japonica

Name That Plant #084