the cursed camellias

We have just got back from England.

I say ‘just’. Yesterday – but what is ‘yesterday’ or ‘last night’ when you are flying across different time zones, sleepless, then enter a narcoleptic fug for hours on end only to enter it again, headachey, the ‘next day’?

We have a nineteen year old cat, Mori, which makes travelling harder. Her one experience in a Japanese cattery or ‘pet hotel’- yeah right – was so traumatic for her (essentially just fed and kept in a small cage with other animals in the same space) that we have never done that again : we either have neighbours on a roster feed and check on her or – as we did this time – have cat sitters as she gets increasingly distressed being left alone and wails furiously on our return with various toilet revenges to follow at the sheer indignation of not being treated like a queen.

I don’t really like anyone staying in my house while I am not there. It feels invasive. I feel self conscious and probed – our collective hoarding a window into our psyches and predilections – not to mention the terror of the space smelling terrible with an unpredictable, ageing cat.

I of course took precautions. Incense, aroma sticks, small bowls of spiced pot pourris; we did a good clean up before leaving; the house felt bohemianly both haphazard but with its own aesthetic logic; the sitter, my best friend in Japan’s daughter, Lily, an arts student, surely intrigued by all the records, tapes, books, objets, pictures, perfumes ( she is an avid cat lover ).

The garden spaces too.

We have really cultivated the greenery of late – the voodoo tropical balcony ; the ‘bower’ out front with its entangled hydrangeas, wisterias and osmanthus ; our new area round the side, ‘Miami’ with its palms and banana tree and papaya; though it clashes with the landlord’s more minimalist requirements he knows how much we love it and lets us overgrow.

We had been warned about the camellia. My ever sensible friend round the corner, Sachiyo, who helps us out with all manner of crises — lost wallets, phones, malfunctioning washing machines – “You use too much soap !!” said she would never have one in her garden because of the ‘poison’ – something I have never associated with this elegant, regally unassuming flower

I associate the camellia – tsubaki in Japanese – with Chanel, sumo wrestlers – who wear camellia oil in their tresses – and Shiseido, whose nineties-y Tsubaki extrait ( above) I bought recently – as well as their ultra popular Tsubaki hair products – which is practically the National Scent Of Japan.

I don’t associate them with severe dermatitis, dizziness and anaphylactic shock, some of the symptoms that can result from coming into contact with the larvae or adult moths of the species

Arna pseudoconspersa, or tea tussock, a toxic haired moth that apparently has a yen for camellias, although our three shrubs have been growing nicely for the last eleven years without any incident or the least trace of the suckers and all threat of them had receded into a once heard factoid.

That is until we landed at Haneda airport, I got my internet connection back on and had a message from Melanie on our MoriSit Whatsapp group chat that she had an angry torso of itchy red spots spreading over her arms, chest, neck and legs as did a teenage friend of her daughter’s who had come to stay. The dermatologist she had panic rushed to asked if she had been in contact with any moths; M told me I should check in the front garden on our return.

Finally emerging from a taxi, so tired we couldn’t speak to each other; grimier and grubbier than I could possibly bear wearing the same clothes that were suitable for the cooler Autumnal morning in Paddington twenty two hours earlier or whatever it was but not for the muggier Nihon and the bipolar excesses of the British Airways flight which tended towards frigid – d was in hoody and three blankets throughout- but then suddenly reheated at mealtimes having me throw off my triple jumpers, I thought I was going to go mad with my grime and the misguided base notes of what I thought would be a fresh vintage Rive Gauche, so matinal and aldehydic and blue silver in the morning but so glandularly musky and feral a whole day later when melded with my jaded body chemistry, but my eyes, though very very tired, were still, luckily, able to see these creatures writing scathingly on the edge of a camellia leaf that we very nearly brushed past.

Clearly this was quite a dangerous public health hazard ( does anyone know how frequently this happens with camellia trees in Asia ? They are everywhere ) but we were simply too destroyed to deal with it there and then; desperate to shut out everything and everyone there and then and sleep – which we did on and off from 12pm to about 8 the following day.

We both awoke buzzing though with the dangerous awareness of those foul creepy crawlies sending hairs out into the air ( ‘burn them !, advised a Japanese friend – but then AI said no no never burn them as they release their jagged hairs into the atmosphere and down into your throat and chest where they can do some really serious damage (some individuals die in this situation).

So I called Kamakura pest control.

No. no appointments available. Maybe next week?

So I ran round to our J father and landlord, the 87 year old superhero you see above with Duncan in a self improvised Hazmat suit with a plastic bag over his head ( he had called Jiro, his son who is a professional gardener and works at the Meigetsuin hydrangea temple down the hill but he was busy elsewhere).

If there is anyone who is the precise opposite of a procrastinator it is Mr Mitomi; he once came round in seconds to bash down a nest of killer hornets that had taken a fancy to our roof – he is more feisty and energetic than most people half his age – and was raring to go to get chopping off the affected areas – that turned out, according to d, to have at least ten times the number of caterpillars on them than you see in these pictures. They were everywher ; no wonder I also had a mysterious rash just before we went away and was taking antihistamines ; these hirsute camellia multilegged insecto-vampiri were already all over the place and we didn’t even know !

G r o sss!

I would like to keep the camellias – they are soon to bloom and have far more flower heads than usual; they do have a certain prettiness, that though virtually scentless, confers some kind of sturdiness to the general proceedings, but the consensus seems to be that with a potential mothmaggeddon looming every year – and even if the garden will look rather bare for a while just when it was going into autumnal flourish – these prim shrubs, now home to legions of lethal grubs that will soon grown nasty wings, are simply going to have to be cut down.

As she usually is, Sachiyo-san was absolutely right.

‘NO CAMELLIAS!’