Long-flowering shrubs
Christopher Lloyd explains which shrubs provide the longest flowering seasons throughout the year
THERE are many favourite flowering trees and shrubs that have a desperately short season of beauty, lasting only the inside of a week. The flowering cherries are notorious for this, yet we enjoy them so intensely in their brief glory that recollection tricks us into imagining that they are not really so ephemeral. Nonetheless, and especially in the small garden, it is the long flowerers that do us the greatest service and that we should mainly concentrate on.
Most winter-flowering shrubs have an immensely extended season, simply because the whole growth process is slowed down in the cold months. Here we find the Chinese witch hazel, the winter cherry, Mahonia japonica, the bush honeysuckle (of which Lonicera x purpusii is the best), Viburnum x bodnantense ‘Dawn’, the laurustinus (Viburnum tinus), winter jasmine and the winter heaths. These I am giving the briefest mention here, because they already, and rightly, get written about a great deal. The mahonia, for instance, is in bloom from October-April, which is a remarkable feat.
Camellias are the best value
Spring is the great season for flowering shrubs, with the majority coming out and going over in a matter of a fortnight or so. Camellias, I should say, give the best value here. Their buds open in succession over many weeks, and if one crop of blossom is spoiled by wind or frost, another soon takes its place. The only trouble about the double and semidouble varieties among them is that the dying flowers turn brown while yet hanging on the shrub. If you cannot be forever picking them over, you can find solace in single camellias such as
C. japonica ‘White Swan’ or the pinkflowered C. williamsii ‘J.C. Williams’, which drop their blossoms cleanly even before they have started browning.
Lilacs, too, brown on the bush and anyway their season is fairly brief. Exceptionally, the pink-flowered Syringa microphylla ‘Superba’ not only fades discreetly but also bears a very creditable second crop in autumn – the more so if you clip the bush over immediately after its first flowering. Its growth is twiggy and not too stout, and it lends itself for use as a flowering hedge up to 8ft (2.4m) high.
Spring flowerers
Piptanthus laburnifolius [Piptanthus nepalensis] is technically evergreen, though its large trifoliate leaves either drop off or look pretty shabby in late winter, but it soon pulls itself together in April and flowers from the end of the month until early June. The bush grows rapidly to 7ft (2.1m) and carries trusses of substantial yellow pea flowers. In
Coronilla glauca [Coronilla valentina subsp. glauca], the warmly scented pea flowers are arranged in a circlet like a coronet. Spring is its main season, but it flowers during most months of the year with a generous performance in autumn. The 3-4½ft (90cm-1.4m) bush wants clipping over two or three times during the growing season to keep it compact, and a bit of shelter from cold winds is advisable.
In late spring and early summer we have some six weeks’ display from that splendid dogwood Cornus kousa var. chinensis, arrayed in white along the tops of branches that tend to be arranged in layers. This shrub takes eight