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Photo Credit: Gerald Klingaman

The evergreen splendid ginger has some of the showiest and largest foliage of the tribe.

I’m always on the lookout for new, useful perennials that can fit into a niche in my garden. And one I’ve simply fallen in love with is Asarum splendens – a wild Chinese ginger. I discovered this plant a few years back, and it’s really proved its merits in my shade garden.

Unlike most wild gingers, with their cute, small leaves, this evergreen Asian ginger has large, marbled leaves and is robust enough to hold its own in my woodland garden. This gorgeous groundcover grows 6-8 inches tall with thick, leathery, lance-shaped foliage about 6 inches long. The leaves are marked with large, irregular patches of silver on a green background, making the plant the most ornamental of the 80-plus species of ginger.

Wild gingers have a decidedly creeping form, and they do produce flowers – but they’re down at ground level, so only slugs, a few ground beetles and the most observant naturalist ever notice them. These brownish, cup-shaped blooms appear in early spring. They’re about the right size to slip over the end of your finger. The fat tube ends in three petals that flare out at right angles. (The flowers of A. splendens are bit larger than our native wild ginger, A. canadense.)

Of course, the low-growing wild gingers shouldn’t be confused with the corn-like ornamental gingers we grow in Southern gardens or to the spice used in Chinese and Indian cuisines. While our native wild ginger (with its green, kidney-shaped, herbaceous leaves) was used extensively in Native American folk medicine, it wasn’t used in the kitchen.

While A. splendens has been available for some time, it didn’t make its way to the US until 1978. That’s when Dr. Richard Howard, who directed the Arnold Arboretum in Boston at the time, was invited to visit China. He brought the plant back, which he found over a wide range in several south-central provinces.