The inflorescence is a cyme with flower stalks rising from a whorl of leaves wrapped around the top of the stem.

[6] Thunberg, one of the Apostles of Linnaeus, had collected dried specimens while working as a doctor for the Dutch East Indies Company.

[10] Varieties of Eriocapitella japonica are cultivated worldwide, especially in China, Japan, and Korea, where naturalized populations are known to exist.

Hundreds of years ago, a form of E. hupehensis with smaller, semi-double flowers and pink sepals escaped cultivation and spread across China to Japan and Korea.

After finding this form in a Shanghai graveyard in 1843, the plant explorer Robert Fortune sent it home to England where it became known as E. japonica, the Japanese anemone.

European horticulturists crossed the Japanese anemone with E. vitifolia to produce cultivars of the artificial hybrid E. × hybrida.

[11] At the Chicago Botanic Garden, Rudy experimented with 26 cultivars of fall-blooming anemones over a 5-year period beginning in 1998.