Making use of a flowering cherry

When I first bought my current house the only deciduous tree in the garden was a fairly young flowering cherry, Prunus ‘Amanogawa’.  Over the years it’s made an upright column about 10 metre / 33ft tall.  For a few brief weeks in late April it’s a pillar of pink tinged white blossom.  For the rest of the growing season it’s purely background greenery, culminating in a desultory effort at autumn colour before the leaves drop to leave bare winter branches.  It provides height, a small amount of shade – but not much else in terms of its own intrinsic interest.

But what it does provide is a climbing and support frame.  At the moment it has two climbers just beginning their annual advance into the higher branches.  Passiflora caerulea – one of the hardiest of the passion flowers - now has inch thick trunks which have survived two harsh winters unscathed.  I’ve lost the top growth – in milder years it’s been semi evergreen – but new shoots are already advancing from the permanent framework that has lodged itself against the multiple upright trunks of the flowering cherry.  By June it will have spread  a mass of 3-5 lobed, dark green leaves through the tree canopy and – if previous years are anything to go by - will begin to produce vertical trails from the higher reaches.  

By July it will begin to flower.  Each of the gorgeously ornate flowers only lasts about three days but are produced so freely that there is colour and beauty until well into the Autumn.  Could you resist this?  I can’t.

Passiflora caerulea

The second climber (at the moment – I do have other plans) is Clematis cirrhosa ‘Freckles’, which has crept in from a shed wall.  This is evergreen with me – in colder climates it would defoliate when the weather got too harsh – and notable for its long flowering period.  All the books say it’s winter flowering.  If that’s the classic definition of the English Winter which ends in June and restarts in August then they’ve got it just about right.  In my garden I get a flowering lull between April and June – and then it starts again and does flower all the way through the winter.

Clematis cirrhosa 'Freckles'

A couple of years ago I had some faded Guzmania bromeliads; houseplants that had finished flowering.  A bit of wire, a bit of wrapping in hanging basket liner and they were attached to the trunk of the cherry at about eye level.  It was an experiment – but it worked.  I didn’t have the flower spike and flowers – but I had an interesting effect from the foliage which assumed far brighter colours in the open air.  I’ll be repeating the experiment this year – and maybe, just maybe, I’ll try a stag horn fern, Platycerium bifurcatum as an experiment on the shady side of the trunks.  I'll have to bring it in for the winter, a small price to pay if I can enhance the sub tropical effect I strive for in my summer garden.

Guzmania in my cherry tree

April thoughts

We've just had the hottest April on record here in the UK - though weather conditions now seem to have settled back to normal for the time of year.  As might be expected the pace of Spring growth has been accelerated, so much so that for many plants it's already early summer.  I photographed these bearded iris recently - sorry, I don't know the exact cultivar - in full flower at least a month ahead of schedule for South West England.

Bearded iris cultivar

At the same time the last of the narcissus was still giving it's all.  Narcissus poeticus is one of the loveliest of the late flowering narcissus and worth a place in any garden.  Invariably it flowers in April, no matter how warm or cool the spring has been.

Narcissus poeticus

Many spring blooming temperate plants flower in response to two stimuli - day length and temperature.  Increasing day length triggers the start of the flowering process - but warmth is needed to accelerate it.  A cool spring will always be one with an elongated flowering succession, while the warmth we've had recently will always force growth and flowering, sometimes well out of season.  Commercial growers have long known this, using greenhouses to accelerate growth, cool houses to retard it and lighting to manipulate growth initiation.  This is one of the compressed years - hasn't it been glorious.

A winter casualty

Nothing in a garden is ever permanent.  Plants may grow - but they also die.  I've lost a well established Phoenix canariensis, the Canary Island Date Palm.  January 2010 was harsh in Plymouth.  A couple of weeks of sub zero temperatures with persistent frost and snow saw it off.  I looked for recovery all summer but no new spears were in evidence.  It could have been resting – there was still green on the badly battered fronds.  But, finally, the recent really low temperatures have crushed my remaining hopes.

Even in the relative warmth of Devon or Cornwall these are always going to be marginal plants.  There are a few larger specimens in very favoured gardens but these are isolated survivors, protected by their individual micro-climates against the hard winters we do get down here every ten years or so.  In recent years, emboldened by the run of warmer winters, lots of young plants have been sited in local gardens.  I bought two small (cheap) specimens in 2003.  One perished early on.  The other thrived - to the extent I was beginning to worry about it taking over a part the garden.  I had, of course put it too close to the house wall and the fronds were reaching to over ten foot (3 metres) before winter struck and removed that problem.

Growth was a little slow at first - perfectly normal for this palm - but, once it got it's roots down it accelerated very nicely.  The photo below shows the growth between 2005 and 2007 - quite impressive for only 3 years in a cool climate where the growing season is relatively short.

Phoenix canariensis growth rate

By the summer of 2009 it was even larger - quite a feature in a small garden.  There is nothing quite like the effect a pinnate fronded palm has in creating a more exotic, sub tropical air.  Now it's gone.  Which means I've got to dig it out - and the remains are pretty hefty.

So thats what the name means

Dryopteris erythrosora - translated from the botanical Latin means oak fern with red sori (the spore capsules on the frond undersides).  I'd never given the name much thought.  I grow it in open shade where it makes a nice upright, semi-evergreen, fronded fern with the distinct advantage that young foliage in late spring is a pleasing red bronze shade, very attractive in the garden setting.  But my plant has always been in a position where I look down on it so don't really notice the sori coming to maturity.  It took a chance gust of wind at exactly the right time to realise how apt the name was.

Red sori - just like it says on the label.