On a recent visit to Japan, I was amused to see some of what I’m pretty sure was Pittosporum tobira, aka Japanese cheesewood:
I’ve written about it a couple of times before — Pittosporum tobira and Pittosporum tobira’s sticky seeds — looking at some of the many specimens growing right next door. But here it was in part of its native range. Neat.
easyscape confirms it as being native to Ibusuki — or at least Kagoshima: https://easyscape.com/categories/shrub?address=Ibusuki-Kagoshima&filter=native.
Someday I hope to learn Japanese. Maybe then I’ll come back to the Japanese Wikipedia entry for it: トベラ. I see they include the kanji derivation of the “specific epithet” tobira: “扉の木”, where “扉” (tobera, トベラ; fei1 in Mandarin) means door, “の” (hiragana, pronounced “no”) shows possession, and “木” (ki, mu4 in Mandarin) is tree.
(I release theses photos into the public domain. These works are marked with CC0 1.0, https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/.)
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