Gardens need not be drab in winter months

Press, 12 July 1985, Page 9

Gardens need not be drab in winter months

Winter is often regarded as the dog-end of the gardening year, the time when books tell us to get on with our pruning and manuring and to take such spare visual pleasure as we can from the tracery of bare twigs and the colour and texture of bark.

While this is partly true, in that the generally gaunt appearance of deciduous trees and shrubs in winter forces us to concentrate on the fine details such as bark, twigs, and dormant buds (which can be a rewarding study in themselves), it isn’t the full story. It is relatively easy to have a colourful garden in winter, by using “coloured” foliage as well as flowers and even a garden designed primarily for spring or summer display can be adapted to include pools of colour in winter.

I was reminded of this at the week-end during a very quick garden tour with a couple of visitors who interrupted my cutting down and manuring (for next summer’s display). A thin wind was blowing, and the previous week had been very frosty, but on this midwinter day upwards of 50 species were in flower — more if you count the abnornally precocious and the stragglers. This can’t stand comparison with a midOctober day, but it isn’t bad.

Prunus subhirtella was showing the first of its pale pink blossoms — dainty little flowers so pale a pink as to be almost white. It is supposed to be the variety “Autumnalis” which flowers intermittently from May to September, but it has never flowered earlier than July.

At the other end of the garden a flowering apricot, the form of Prunus mume known as “Sanguinea,” is also beginning to do its thing. From now until probably mid-September we can expect to see successive sprays of its bright, reddish pink flowers.

This is remarkable tree. Planted as a spindly, yearold graft, it shot up rapidly to a height of about five metres then ceased adding to its height as successive waves of summer pests afflicted it: first leaf curl fungus, then leaf-curling aphids. Because of its size and the proximity of other plants, spraying it is not practical; it continues to present a tatty, bony picture in summer. But every spring every live twig is smothered with blossoms, which are never open all at once, but come out in waves over many weeks.

JARDENER’S ! DIARY Derrick Rooney

We did have a second flowering apricot — an unidentified variety, possibly “The Geisha” which came with the garden — until age and disease reduced it to such a small amount of live wood that I performed euthanasia.

It has not been replaced; sadly, the flowering apricots seem now to be almost unobtainable from nurseries.

These were not the only deciduous shrubs going through their paces at the week-end.

A feature of many winter flowers is scent and in this respect the witch-hazel ranks highly. My witchhazel bush has never been up to much at flowering time in the past but is carrying plenty of buds. Although they have fattened a little, none has opened yet; last year, also, its buds were slow to open, and in the finish most of them aborted. Witch-hazels in city gardens are now in full flower. A wintersweet (Chimonanthus praecox), although nearly smothered by a rampant purple flax and a pyracantha which is barren this year, is flowering and filling its corner with scent. The true hazels ornamental and fruiting both, are carrying numerous male catkins which will soon shed clouds of pollen and a couple of forms of Chaenomeles (popularly known as “Japonicas”) have been flowering precociously for weeks. One is white, and the other a shocking orange named “Coral Flame” — not everybody’s choice of colour, but a stunning sight at this time of year. Best of all, the winter jasmine, Jasminum nudiflorum is a mass of yellow flowers on bare, green branches against a wall. Though it is scentless, and a scentless jasmine might seem a little like strawberries without cream, this redeems itself by flowering through the coldest months.

More a shrub than a climber, Jasminum nudiflorum has lax branches which need some support, and is best against a warm

wall. If you don’t have a warm wall to spare, don’t despair, because this low climber is perfectly hardy to frost and winter rain, and will grown in any aspect where its roots don’t get waterlogged. Among evergreens, discounting the winter-flower-ing camellias and Rhododendron “Christmas Cheer,” which I don’t grow, there is plenty of winter colour. Lots of heaths are still in flower: various forms of hybrid Erica darleyensis, including the rosy pink “Darley Dale” and the white “Silver Beads,” have been flowering brightly since May. The silvery pink “Ghost Hills” is starting to go over now, but has been a mass of flower sprays. Erica carnea “Eileen Porter” has been in flower for many weeks and other forms of the species, including the white “Springwood” and “Snow Queen” (the former prostrate and spreading, the latter more upright), are at their peak. “Myretoun Ruby” is as close to ruby red as you could expect a health to get, and there are more, in white, rosy pink and purple. A step up the size scale, Erica erigena, the “Irish heath,” which has been bedevilled by name changes and is probably still best

known as “Erica mediterranea,” is a fine winterflowering shrub. The best garden forms are either very small or very slow growing. “Nana” is in scale with the rock garden, and has rosy purple flowers; there is a white form. “W.T. Rackliff,” much misspelt, with pure white flowers, is a dome-shaped bush which reaches waist height eventually, but is so slow to get there that it may safely be planted in the rock garden. “Rosslare,” similarly compact but rosy pink, is a good old one raised in New Zealand. A newer form, just beginning to be widely known, is “Irish Salmon.” This is another lazybones, putting on scarcely 10cm in height annually in my garden but its habit is more erect.

The flowers are a clear, light silvery pink, but be warned: in some New Zealand nurseries it has been confused with “Irish Dusk,” which grows faster and has flowers in a deeper shade of pink. Look before you buy.

Both these forms were discovered growing wild in Ireland by a noted British heather man, Dr David McClintock. Under the trees a waft of scent indicates that Sarco-

cocca ruscifolius is in flower. The flowers of this small evergreen shrub are white and about Icm long but are so insignificant that if they had no scent you could walk past the bush a dozen times without noticing them. In due course the flowers are succeeded by bright red berries, which can be quite showy if the birds leave them alone. A couple are still hanging on the bush — remnants of last year’s flowering which the birds have missed.

Several other species of Sarcococca are available and for garden purposes any one seems to be as good as the others.

As the name indicates, Sarcococca has foliage somewhat resembling that of the “butcher’s broom,” Rusucus aculeatus. The folksy explanation of the latter’s popular name is that butchers used bundles of cut stems to sweep their chopping blocks. I think this story is nice, but apocryphal. The foliage is too prickly to hold and it isn’t a very effective shape for sweeping with. Technically, the “butcher’s broom” is herbaceous, but as it is evergreen as well as everflowerng most people regard it as a shrub. It must rank among the most eccentric members of the lily family. At any time of the year it is sure to be carrying a few of its large, round, orangered fruit. The tiny flowers are the same green as the stems and appear to grow directly out of the middle of the “leaves.” In fact, this doesn’t happen because the leaves aren’t really leaves at all but what botanists call cladodes — flattened extensions of the stem. In normal circumstances the “butcher’s broom” has male and female flowers on different plants, and you would need one of each to get fruit, but there is a hermaphrodite form which fruits freely on its own. This is “Wheeler’s Variety,” and it is the one to ask for. Birds take the ripe fruit, and seedlings come up in odd parts of the garden as a result of their activities (I often come across the distinctive large seeds while weeding), but I pull them out because in all probability they will revert to the normal state and be either male or female, but not both.