Why are some trees beloved while others have fallen so far out of fashion that few nurseries even bother to grow them?
It’s one of the first lessons we learn at school: life ain’t always fair. Some children are more popular than others. Some kids always get picked first for sports teams and pantomime performances, while others languish on the sidelines – and it’s no different in our gardens. Some plants are famous limelight-hoggers – winter hellebores, spring daffodils, scented summer roses – while others, through no fault of their own, are rarely given a mention in gardening magazines, or seen in garden centres. Many beautiful, worthy plants that were once popular no longer make the cut because, for whatever reason, we don’t buy enough of them to make them profitable for wholesale growers to propagate in bulk.
If it’s a perennial or quick-growing shrub that falls out of fashion, it’s no big deal. When (and if) their fortunes improve, it only takes a season or two to produce loads more. For example, consider the resurgence in popularity of the hydrangea. When I began writing for NZ Gardener in the 1990s, these blousy beauties were dubbed “nana shrubs” and no designer, commercial florist nor bride-to-be wanted a bar of them. Now they are back in vogue in a big way, with new cultivars released each year.
But when specimen trees lose their lustre and fall off wholesale nursery lists, there’s every chance we will never again see them for sale at our local garden centres. Not only do trees have a much longer lead-in time, nurseries don’t want to risk growing large numbers of varieties that no one wants to buy.
The problem is that sometimes the reason gardeners don’t want to buy certain trees is simply because we have neither seen nor heard of them before. They don’t get any press, and thus are consigned to obscurity.
In an attempt to redress this injustice, I got in touch with a mix of knowledgeable growers, retailers and fellow gardeners to compile this list of 35 fabulous trees that, well, hardly anyone plants anymore. Some are more obscure than others. Some may be near impossible to find. But that’s part of the thrill of the chase, isn’t it?
Let’s start with the cercis family. Cercis canadensis ‘Forest Pansy’ is everyone’s favourite specimen tree. What’s not to like? It has a graceful habit and a smattering of magenta spring blossoms followed by vivid claret, heart-shaped foliage that turns flaming copper in autumn. But if I’ve seen a ‘Forest Pansy’ in one Auckland garden, I’ve seen it in a thousand (including my own, pictured at left).
And it’s not just Auckland. “We’ve sold out of all our ‘Forest Pansy’,” says award-winning landscape architect Sally Brown of Blueskin Nurseries in Otago, “unlike the shiny green Cercis siliquastrum or yellow ‘Ace of Hearts’. People often aren’t very adventurous when they’re choosing trees.”
The current fashion consensus is that claret cercis are hot, while plain green cercis are not. Yet green-leafed, white-flowered Judas trees, such as
(also sold as texensis) or are arguably more sophisticated than their increasingly common purple cousins, especially as coloured foliage isn’t to everyone’s taste in small spaces.
Or how about
Cercis reniformis ‘Texas White’
Cercis canadensis
Cercis siliquastrum
var.
‘Alba’, Cercidiphyllum japonicum f. pendulum,
the weeping katsura? It also has heart-shaped foliage and deserves more affection, according to Grant Eyre, manager of Waikato wholesale nursery Growing Spectrum. I asked Grant to imagine he was writing an internet dating profile extolling its sexiest qualities. “She’s well rounded and graceful,”