Fatsia Japonica Through the Year: What to Do in Each Season

Spring: the one season that matters

Almost every job on this plant belongs to spring, and doing them at any other time of year makes each of them harder. As the soil warms and the first new leaves start to unfurl at the shoot tips, the plant has the entire growing season ahead of it to recover from anything you do.

Start with an inspection. Turn leaves over and look along the veins for scale before the population builds, cut off frost-damaged shoot tips back to live wood now that you can see where live wood begins, and remove any leaf that has yellowed over winter by cutting its stalk close to the stem. Then do the structural work: cut back any leggy stem hard into bare wood, separate and replant basal suckers, and repot container plants that have filled their pots.

Finish with a mulch. Two inches (5 cm) of leaf mold or garden compost spread over the root area, kept an inch clear of the stems, feeds the plant for the whole year and holds the moisture the surface roots depend on. Container plants get a balanced slow-release feed at the same time. Neither job is worth doing later in the year.

Summer: water and shade, nothing else

Summer is a watching season. No pruning, because a plant stripped of leaves in heat will struggle, and no feeding after midsummer, because soft late growth will not harden before winter. What the plant needs is even moisture and protection from light it was not built for.

Check the soil with a finger under the mulch during dry spells and water thoroughly when it is dry two inches (5 cm) down. Plants in containers need this check every few days in hot weather, plants in the ground perhaps once a fortnight. Watch for leaves that pale from the top of the plant downward, which means the sun has moved round further than you expected as the season progressed; a temporary screen is easier than moving an established shrub.

Late summer is the window for semi-ripe cuttings, once the season's growth has firmed but before it goes fully woody. It is also when the crawler stage of scale is over, so a second inspection of the leaf undersides now catches anything that survived spring and stops it overwintering.

Autumn: leave it alone and let it flower

This is the plant's moment. In late autumn, when almost nothing else in a shaded garden is doing anything, fatsia opens branched heads of creamy white globe-shaped flower clusters held above the foliage. They last for weeks, they carry a faint scent, and they pull in whatever late-flying insects are still about at a time of year when there is nothing else for them.

The only reason to know this is so you do not cut it off. The autumn tidying urge arrives at exactly the wrong moment for fatsia: prune now and you remove the flower heads, leave fresh wounds going into cold weather, and gain nothing that spring pruning would not do better. Put the pruners away until spring.

What autumn does call for is drainage. Clear fallen leaves that have packed around the base of the stems and would hold water there all winter, make sure container drainage holes have not silted up, and lift pots onto feet so they are not standing in a saucer of rain. Stop feeding entirely and reduce watering as growth slows.

Winter: cold, wind and wet

Fatsia is hardier than its tropical appearance suggests, coming through around 5F (-15C) on an established plant in a sheltered position, though the leaves themselves start to show damage well before that. What actually kills plants in winter is rarely the cold reading on the thermometer: it is cold wind stripping water from the leaves faster than frozen roots can replace it, and it is roots sitting in cold waterlogged soil.

Deal with wind first. A plant in a sheltered corner needs nothing. A plant in an exposed position benefits from a temporary windbreak of mesh on stakes on the prevailing side, which does more good than wrapping the plant itself. Containers are more vulnerable than open ground because the root ball freezes solid; move pots against a house wall and wrap the pot, not the foliage.

Expect some winter leaf damage in a hard year and do nothing about it until spring. Blackened leaf edges and drooping foliage after a freeze often recover as the plant thaws, and cutting damaged growth off in midwinter exposes the tissue behind it to the next cold spell. Wait until new growth shows you where the live wood ends.

Write down the date the new leaves first unfurl each spring and the date the flower heads first open in autumn. Those two dates, kept for three years alongside the position of the plant, tell you more about how a given spot suits fatsia than any general hardiness figure.