Last month a fortuitous thing happened. I discovered a large greenhouse beside the university where I work. It is used by the Faculty of Pharmacological Science to grow medicinal plants for research and is tended by a retinue of elderly men in powder-blue overalls who water and weed and keep the insects in check.

The good thing about March is that there are no university classes; the researchers are all off in Borneo or Guatemala, or wherever it is that they go to study medicinal plants, give medicinal presentations and try the local ‘medicine’ (for medicinal purposes only), which left myself and the powder-blue people to enjoy this cedar pollen-free paradise in peace.

When I first stepped into the greenhouse, the outside temperature was a big fat zero; inside it was a lush twenty-five degrees Celsius, which had me loosening my collar and humming “April Sun in Cuba” while I settled down to read my lunchtime paperback. It was Charles Bukowski’s “Post Office”, a winding yarn about a guy (himself) who skives off during working hours to go gamble on horses, drink, chase women and write bestsellers.

The powder-blue people disappear every lunchtime, so after a few weeks I started to feel a little lonely sitting in this jungle all by myself. To remedy the situation I sent out an invitation to my long-time friend, Smokin’ Joe Matsumoto, the old kitchen gardener who lives up my street. I asked him to join me. I thought he might enjoy sitting around and telling yarns about ‘old Himeji’ beneath the Piper longum (peppercorn) bush, Tamarindus indica (tamarind) tree, Cymbopogon (lemongrass),  Zingiber officinale (ginger), jasmine and orchids, but I’m yet to hear back from him.

I wanted to show him the Rauvolfia serpentina (Indian snakeroot) which, I’ve since found out, contains two hundred known alkaloids and is used as a traditional antivenin to treat snake bites in India. A little more reading and I discovered that Alexander the Great used it to cure Ptolemy of a poisoned arrow injury; Mahatma Gandhi also took it as a sedative. Snakeroot contains reserpine, an antipsychotic, antihypertensive alkaloid, which was once used by Western medicine to treat high blood pressure and schizophrenia. It is still one of the fifty most used plants in Chinese medicine.

I knocked on Smokin’ Joe’s door—he has a bear-like tendency to venture out in late March when the fragrance of the plum and cherry blossoms carries on the gusting Haru-Ichiban—but there was still no reply.

Then I had second thoughts; I feared our little ‘green-ins’ might attract attention. If other administration staff found out they could take their coffee breaks in the tropics, it might get a little too hot in there. I had to be careful.

The other day, I finished the Charles Bukowski book and searched my shelves for the next thing to take to the greenhouse. I passed over Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (too dark), Spencer Chapman’s soldiering-in-Malaya memoir The Jungle Is Neutral (too long), and Peter Matthiessen’s missionaries-in-the-Amazon adventure At Play in the Fields of the Lord (too much drama). In the end, I picked out an old favourite, Eric Hansen’s Stranger in the Forest, about his journey on foot from one side of Borneo to the other.

So, with coffee and book in hand, and whistling Guns ‘n Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle”, I returned to the greenhouse yesterday.

Only to find it locked.

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You can read more notes from the Good Hood of Himeji here: https://www.mightytales.net/seaweed-salad-days