The ancient Japanese tradition you should try with chrysanthemums

Supermarkets have featured bunches of chrysanthemums for weeks now, a prompt to spend up
big for Mother’s Day. And we do – at least $200 million on cut flowers, many of them ’mums.

Of course it could just be that chrysanthemums are in season. They are a feature of the autumn garden, along with the much-more fashionable dahlias. While dahlias are darlings of the influencer-world, ‘mums are rejects, suffering from the aura of those supermarket bunches of long stiff stems and relentlessly upright blooms.

While many mums will be hoping for an ABC bouquet (Anything But Chrysanthemums) for Mother’s Day, I think these noble flowers have been unfairly maligned.

The best garden use of chrysanthemums I have seen is at David Glenn’s garden at Lambley Nursery outside Ballarat in Victoria, where a long straight gravel path is edged with low, mounding chrysanthemums that are completely covered with dark red double flowers. It’s a striking effect against the gravel paths and the borders behind.

The key for gardeners is to pick your cultivar with care, paying close attention to form as well as flower colour. Choose long-stemmed varieties for the picking garden, and mounding varieties for pot and garden use.

Admittedly there are limited options available locally. To see what we are missing out on, check out the catalogue of Kings Mums, a grower in California that lists more than 150 cultivars, at least half of which you’ll want in your garden right now.

Or visit Japan in the autumn. The chrysanthemum is not just the symbol of the Japanese imperial family, but a flower loved for its wide range of looks, from tightly symmetrical flat blooms and dense round balls, to wilder looking tufts and brushes and long spidery falls. It is also revered as a medicinal herb with the power to extend life.

The first chrysanthemum show was held in Japan in 910, and ever since September 9 has been National Chrysanthemum Day. These days the festival is usually celebrated by drinking sake with chrysanthemum petals floating in it, but I learned about a less alcoholic and more traditional ritual from Midori Shintani, who spoke at the recent Australian Landscape Conference in Melbourne.