is normally
grown as a garden shrub which brightens up the garden with flowers early in the
spring, on the bare wood before the leaves. There are several garden varieties
with flowers ranging from white to pink, salmon and dark red. Once pollinated
they form hard green fruits over the summer months, which turn golden colour in
the autumn. These tart fruits rich in Vitamin C can be used to make a delicate
red jelly, a delicious alternative to marmalade on toast at breakfast.
The Japanese Quince is a manageable shrub for
the smaller garden, even lending itself to being tamed into a hedge, whereas as
the Common Quince - Cydonia oblong to which
it is distantly related, is a small to medium tree of untidy growth, grown for its
larger but also hard, tart fruits which mature late in the autumn and has had something
of a revival in recent years due to peoples growing interest in old varieties and
future food security.
Discovered by a botanist in the late 1700’s
and introduced to the UK in the early 1800’s by Joseph Banks makes the Japanese
Quince a relatively new species to the UK therefore there is little or no
reference in any of the early herbals and Mrs Grieve’s in her 1931 A Modern Herbal lists it under
Cydonia Japonica and really only discusses it as an ornamental shrub, however
it does seem to have an extensive history and uses in Chinese Medicine.
The shrub is the title of and features in a
short story written in 1910, The Japanese Quince by John Galsworthy.
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