During a powerful wind storm earlier in the year one of my oldest sallow / selje trees on the edge of the wild part of the garden was wind thrown and fell over the part of my garden most resembling a forest garden where my impressive 20-year old udo (Aralia cordata) is located. Luckily, it did no damage to my apple trees and the trunk is hanging horizontally over this area with part of the root still attached and what was the top of the tree now in full flower right next to the pathway down the garden. Salix caprea is dioecious with male and female flowers on separate trees. This one is female. I have over the years become more and more aware of the incredible importance of Salix caprea in providing food in early spring to a myriad of insects – wild bees, bumble bees, moths etc., all programmed to emerge at this time. In addition, it is host in Norway to 260 moth and butterfly species at the larval stage! This then leads to this tree being an important source of food to a range of birds and some like the chiffchaff (gransanger) are also programmed to return at sallow flowering time. During visits to my mum in Southern England in March / early April I visit other fallen sallows to look for interesting insects and I’ve noticed that they can continue flowering for several years after falling and resprout from the part of the root in the soil. So, although I was initially saddened bye the loss, this is just one of several large sallow trees in this part of the garden and now I have the top of a sallow at eye level right next to a path in the garden and can now study visiting insects closely. Just now, I saw an early bumblebee / markhumle (Bombus pratorum) feeding on the catkins. It’s also a perfect place to hang my moth trap (picture)! Hence “A blessing in disguise” (Norwegian: hell i uhell). See also https://www.edimentals.com/blog/?p=32035
A small tortoiseshell (neslesommerfugl) feeding on male catkins during a visit to my son and family on Nesodden last week)
The year’s first taste of Hosta and Udo shoots (dug in the autumn, stored in the cellar and forced in the living room in the dark), used in today’s delicious salad. Easy when you know how! The ingredients list is below the pictures!
Aralia cordata, udo
Aralia cordata, udo
Hosta
Hosta
Hosta
Horseradish shoots
Salad with udo, Hosta, sea kale, Begonia flowers and more
Salad with udo, Hosta, sea kale, Begonia flowers and more
Salad with udo, Hosta, sea kale, Begonia flowers and more
Despite the record warm May here at 63.4N with temperatures up to 30C and drought like conditions (forest fire warnings on the news every day), my now 23 year old udo (Aralia cordata) has grown away well, but perhaps not as vigorous as normal in cooler damper conditions which are the norm for May. Sadly, my California-udo (Aralia californica) which was in a much drier location seems to have died, although I have a clone in the World Garden at the Væres Venner Community Garden. Thanks to KVANN member Nina Sandli who took the picture on a visit on 25th May! More about my super vegetable in many blog posts, see https://www.edimentals.com/blog/?s=udo or read about it in my book Around the World in 80 plants!
I 2021 publiserte Norsk Hagetidend en serie artikler jeg hadde skrevet om 10 av mine favoritt flerårige grønnsaker til Norsk Hagetidend. Alle artiklene kan nå bli lastet ned ved å klikke på lenkene nedenfor!
English: In 2021, I wrote a series of two page articles about my favourite perennial vegetables for Norsk Hagetidend (the magazine of the Norwegian Horticultural Society) in Norwegian. The complete series can be found below.
The plants are (scroll down to all the articles): February 2021 Caucasian spinach / stjernemelde (Hablitzia tamnoides)
Presenting this year’s udo (Aralia cordata) almost fully extended 🙂 Thanks to Elin Eriksen for the picture (she has been Artist in Residence at the Edible Garden the last few days with focus on perennial vegetables)!
On 9th April 2016 I was staying with my new friend Tei Kobayashi in the mountains in a lovely village, Nogura, above Ueda in Nagano Prefecture. I was put in touch with Tei through a mutual friend in Norwegian Seed Savers (KVANN), Caroline Ho-Bich-Tuyen Dang, when I put out a call for an interpreter when visiting the farm with the underground udo forcing caverns in Tokyo: https://www.edimentals.com/blog/?p=8284 and https://www.edimentals.com/blog/?p=7499 Tei had kindly agreed to travel down to help out! She took me to see udo (Aralia cordata) being grown on a small farm in her village with a villager who had knowledge of sansai. The new shoots were just appearing through a thick layer of rice husks. Here’s a video and some pictures of this beautiful place! Thanks again to you Tei for your hospitality without which this would never have been possible! There will hopefully be more posts from the visit with Tei as soon as time allows! Tei starts talking about another use of rice husks, in nukazuke, fermented vegetables in rice bran (nuka), see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nukazuke (Thanks to Tei for the following clarification: I just wanted to comment on the Udo cultivation process. I just learned that it is not “nuka “ but “momigara” that the plants are grown in to keep them white. “Momigara is the outermost husk of the rice kernel. “Nuka” is the inner rice hull it is very finely ground into an almost powdery substance. Nuka is the outer covering of the rice that is removed to make it white…it is often polished after the hull is removed”.)
Showing us Chengiopanaxsciadophylloides (koshiabura) which had yet to emerge:
Yesterday, I introduced Agricultural Explorer David Fairchild who, inspired from visiting Japan, was determined to try to introduce udo (Aralia cordata) and wrote an interesting paper 120 years ago giving more details about this novel perennial vegetable: Udo introduction to the US with cultivation instructions (1903) 11 years later in 1914, he wrote a really interesting report summing up his experiences with udo. It blows my mind to read how much work was done on this plant over 100 years ago, but sad to see that it was never adopted in a big way! You can read the whole report and I recommend you do, but I’ve picked out some titbits from the report that I found particularly interesting followed by a few other interesting excerpts from various inventories of introduced plants to the US!
I stumbled upon this interesting US Department of Agriculture Bulletin from 1903 by David Fairchild, who calls himself Agricultural Explorer, entitled “Three New Plant Introductions from Japan”. There are 4 pages and some photos concerning udo (Aralia cordata) in the article “Udo : A new winter salad” (see pages 17-20 and the plates in the pdf below). This gives detailed growing instructions for “Kan udo” and “Moyashi udo” for harvesting during winter (October to May); these are cultivation techniques rather than udo varieties. Winter cultivation is more relevant to areas with relatively warm winters. The other two plant introductions are Edgeworthia chrysantha as a fibre plant (for producing paper) and wasabi (Wasabia japonica). Kyle Dougherty posted on my Edimentals Facebook group in 2021 about the same program with a great picture of udo cultivation and wrote “Here’s an interesting story for the udo (Aralia cordata) fans out there. In 1902 the USDA imported some 25,000 improved udo plants into the United States from Japan for trialing as a new vegetable crop. Plants were grown at the experiment station in Rockville, MD until at least 1917, and were also distributed to private gardens around the country and the Chico field station in CA. The Rockville experiment station is long gone, and is now the site of Montgomery College, but I can’t help but wonder if any of these plants are still out there somewhere. It’s also kind of a bummer that it never really caught on despite the effort the USDA put into it.”
Here’s the document I discovered (pages and plates are repeated below)
This year’s udo (Aralia cordata) selfie pictures, probably the highest ever with a flowering spike way above my head. I harvested about 1/3 of the shoots in the spring. This is my largest herbaceous perennial vegetable that was planted here 20 years old ago! It has never had any fertiliser and is growing on the steepest slope in my garden. Ostrich fern (strutseving) and giant bellflower (storklokke) can be seen in the foreground.
Not something I can make very often as I don’t find fasciated dandelions very often! A simple salad was put together, made fascinating with a fasciated dandelion. The blanched udo (Aralia cordata) was ready: I harvested some blanched sea kale (Crambe maritima) too and I found a fasciated dandelion to decorate the salad The udo was peeled
…and the salad was put together with the fasciated dandelion flower stem cut into strips and mixed in with a sesame oil – soya sauce dressing:
Perennial vegetables, Edimentals (plants that are edible and ornamental) and other goings on in The Edible Garden
Showing us Chengiopanax sciadophylloides (koshiabura) which had yet to emerge: 
I harvested some blanched sea kale (Crambe maritima) too and I found a fasciated dandelion to decorate the salad
The udo was peeled 
