The month of the witch-hazel

Press, 12 July 1979, Page 13

The month of the witch-hazel

Among the shrubs and trees that will be coming to a peak in gardens in the next month to six weeks are the witch-hazels — shrubs or small tres of the genus, hamamelis. There are two species which flower about this time, one which flowers a little later, and a fourth which flowers earlier, in April and May. The two that are flowering now (and their hybrids) are the most interesting; one is the Chinese Hamamelis mollis and the other the Japanese equivalent, H. japonica. Both are available in New Zealand, along with about half a dozen selected forms or hybrids of the two. All of them, with their daddy-long-legs flowers on the bare branches in winter and their (usually) soft yellow display before the leaves fall in autumn, are first-rate garden shrubs, and all are easy to grow if simple requirements are met.

Most of them have yellow flowers, though in some of the hybrids (known collectively as Hamamelis X intermedia) the flowers are reddish brown or orange. One of the most popular of these is “Jelena,” which leans towards the japonica side of the cross and has been described in a catalogue as having “very large fragrant flowers of soft russet orange.” As I grew it, it was a non-exciting plant with small, spindly flowers, and little fragrance; but I may have had a poor form, or the growing conditions may not have been suitable. I have certainly seen it flowering profusely in other gardens, and colouring well (in crimson and orange shades) in the autumn.

A better plant, in my experience, in the orange range is one introduced a few years ago under the name “Carmine Red.” In this the petals are soft orange, shading to bronze, and the sepals are a rich, dark red. The scent is good, and the flowers have an air of substance about them. If there is room for only one, however, and this will be the case in most gardens, the first choice must be Hamamelis mollis itself.

This Chinese species was introduced to the West in 1879 by Charles Maries, a 'collector em-

ployed by Veitch, the big English nursery. Plants raised from Maries’s seed collections first went on sale to the public about the turn of the century. Hamamelis mollis not only has the sweetest scent (clean, penetrating, and free of spiciness) but has the handsomest summer dress, too, with its downy, pleated leaves (“mollis” means hairy) that go rich yellow in autumn. It is an erect shrub or small tree, with long, whippy branches, and though it is not an ex-press-train grower, it can eventually reach seven metres.

This takes a long time, though, and the only one I have seen that approached

GARDENER’S DIARY

By Derrick Rooney

this height must have been close to 50 years old. Hamamelis japonica is smaller, with a spreading habit, seldom more than four metres high but often as much across.

The hybrids, as might be expected, show a wide variation of intermediate forms. “Jelena,” in my garden, had the bushiness of H. japonica and the straight petals of mollis; “Carmine Red” has the reddish sepals of japonica and the whippy branches of mollis.

The two are closely related, and some botanists have cast doubt on whether they should be regarded as two species. But they are quite different, arid even a layman can tell them apart without difficulty.

In Hamamelis mollis the sepals are purplish and the petals are straight, but curve back to form a hook at the apex. The leaves are oval to heart shaped, very downy on the underside and sometimes downy on top also. Hamamelis japonica has undulating petals, noticed at the apex and not hooked. The leaves are glabrous (smooth) or nearly so, oval, and smaller than those of Hamamelis mollis.

None of them is difficult to grow, given frea

drainage, and acid soil (lime gives them indigestion), and an abundant supply of organic matter.

Most of their growth is completed by midsummer, and they are equipped to cope with a spell of hot, dry weather in later summer and early autumn (their autumn leaf colour and winter floral display will be all the better for it), but in the early part of summer, up to and after New Year, they must have plenty of water.

That is the secret of growing witch-hazels: to keep them growing strongly until the wood is ready to begin ripening as the end of the season approaches.

Plants starved of food and moisture in spring and early summer will soon show their displeasure by sulky and introverted behaviour; and once they have become congested and woody it is very difficult to make them grow vigorously again — a point to remember when choosing one in a nursery.

It is worth taking a bit of trouble to select a good plant of witch-hazel, because they are among the most expensive shrubs on the market. A plant from any Christchurch nursery this year will cost, probably, between $8 and $ll. The steep price is not an indication of great beauty or rarity, but simply a reflection of the difficulty nurserymen have in propagating them. Cuttings can be rooted without much difficulty in a mist unit, but once they are taken out of the mist and potted up it is almost impossible to keep them growing. Seed takes too long (two years to germinate; another seven to reach flowering size), and In any case only the species can be reproduced by this method. So the plants for sale must be grafted. Grafted plants can, like fruit trees, be grown on to marketable size in a year or two, but not without problems. Various understocks have been tried, and the most widely used one is the autumn-flower-ing American species, Hamamelis virginiana; this, too, must be raised from seed, which takes two years to germinate, and another two to grow big enough to be host.

So the plants that appear for sale in the nurseries represent six or seven years work.

The problems do not end at the nursery gate, for the rootstock is prone to sucker, especially if damaged, and after a while the unwary gardener is likely to find his scion crowded out of existence by a Yankee horde. This would be all very well if Hamamelis virginiana were as good as the other species, but it is not. The flowers, which appear in autumn, are smaller and less sweetly scented than those of the Asiatics, and are hidden behind the leaves; this shrub had the annoying habit of holding its brown, dead leaves right through the winter. So the rules are mulch well, keep the hoe in the toolshed, and do not transplant. Keep the flower arrangers at bay, too; none of the hamamelis species breaks readily from old wood, and when a branch is removed there comes a lacuna where the flowers should be. These are shrubs to be enjoyed in the garden, not in the vase.

When planted there, incidentally, they will not encourage witches, despite the popular name; the “witch” of witch-hazel does not bear on broomsticks, but is a corruption of the old word “wych,” meaning whippy. The name “witch-hazel” was bestowed on these shrubs by the American colonists, because of the similarity in growth habit and leaf between the North American species and the hedgerow hazels of the Old World. They are not related to hazels, but have their own family, the Hamamelidaceae, made up of several genera of trees and shrubs in both hemispheres. One of these is Parrotia persica, a rugged-looking small tree from Asia Minor that needs protection from easterly winds in Christchurch and if given this colours beautifully in autumn. Like the witch-hazels, Parrotia persica blooms in late winter, when its petal-less flowers erupt like bright red bosses all over the leafless twigs. There is a fine specimen in Millbrook Reserve.