VAL BOURNE enjoys the wild beauty of the Japanese Alps

I have just come back from lecturing in Japan, the home of the heated toilet seat and hand driers that actually work. I have been speaking very slowly in short bursts for nearly two weeks, followed by my interpreter. Now I'm back I'm still missing out verbs and I have been telling everyone "Tokyo very hot". But, hopefully, I will remember to sprinkle a few into this article.

It's my third visit. But this time I managed to escape to the Mountains of Nagano, an area known as the Japanese Alps. This forested alpine region hosted the 1998 Winter Olympics and it's highly popular in summer and winter with the Japanese. High above the tree line there are grassy slopes alive with orange azaleas and pumpkin-yellow hemerocallis interspersed with gem-like blue irises.

Later on the hills will be studded with blue scabious and these will sway among plumes of Miscanthus sinensis.

Forests still cover 67 per cent of Japan's total land area and, as much of the land is too steep for building houses, lots of native flora and wildlife still abound in this beautiful country.

In all there are 5,629 native species of vascular plants in Japan and ten per cent are ferns. The Japanese celebrate their spectacular landscape by creating gardens full of rocks and water and they also hike among the hills. Once you have seen wild Japan, their garden style makes complete sense.

Lower down the mountains among the trees there were lots of plants growing wild that gardeners would recognise.

Among them were rodgersias, plants of moist shady places. I spotted R. podophylla with its horse-chestnut like leaves and airy cream-white flowers. Colourful candy-pink primulas, P. japonica, lined steams and large stands of veratrum, a handsome plant with pleated egg-shaped leaves, stood in water. Close by astibles and filipendulas blazed in pinks and reds.

Lower down among the trees there were a whole range of highly recognisable plants including dryopteris, thalictrums of all heights, epimediums, hostas and a native columbine Aquilegia oxysepala.

Japan is also home to several species of bellflower, or campanula, and we saw the long, dusky pink bells of C. punctata.

My wild foray was the only part of my trip where my Japanese hosts and I were able to share a conversation. We must thank the Swedish botanist, Carl Linnaeus, for creating his binomial system of genera and species. This biological version of esperanto unites gardeners throughout the world - allowing them to enthuse together.