These useful plants are berried treasure
COTONEASTERS—WHICH some people call ‘Cotton Easters’—belong to one of those genera (Berberis is another) with far too many boring species that only a committed specialist would want to grow. The botanists have notched up at least 500 of them so far and the Chinese (such enthusiastic ‘splitters’ when it comes to recording their native flora) add a few more species every year.
I’ve grown quite a lot of cotoneasters over the years, but rather too many came from kind friends who collected them as seed in Yunnan or the Himalayas and turned out to be as dull as they are rare (the plants, I mean, not the friends). In fact, I don’t really mind if they die (ditto, plants not friends), but they never do because cotoneasters are extremely easy to please, thrive on neglect and go on growing unfussily for years on end.
Some of them, such as C. bullatus, with its large, wrinkly leaves, are excellent deciduous foliage plants with good autumn colour and handsome clusters of berries. Alas, many of these berried beauties are stripped bare by the birds before winter is upon us. Then, their seedlings pop up everywhere.
As for the over-popular C. horizontalis, well, it has its admirers, although I think it best left to supermarket car parks. Actually, there is a pretty form called C. horizontalis Variegatus whose leaves are edged with white, turning pink in autumn, but I find it has a tendency to revert to the plain-leaved type, so I can’t be bothered with it any more.
However, every rule has its exceptions. One of the best features of our new-ish garden in the Itchen Valley is a row of mature C. salicifolius plants that screens us from a public footpath. The plants are magnificent—they’re at least 20ft tall, so I can never decide whether they’re trees or shrubs. I thought they were C. salignus at first, but their leaves stay on all through winter and—this is the important point —so do their berries, which must be fairly unpalatable to birds as they’re only eaten in really icy weather. The rest fall off in spring. All through winter, the leaves and berries shine out with life and colour, lit up by the horizontal rays of the sun.
And yet, there are even better varieties of cotoneaster that will flourish on such miserable soils as ours. I’d just started to list the ones I thought I should acquire when I received a letter from Charles Jessel, the veteran gardener who’s an expert on using evergreen trees and shrubs to shelter his garden in Kent and give year-round interest to the plantings.
Sir Charles sent me a picture of his C. salicifolius (even bigger and better than mine) alongside the yellow-berried Rothschildianus
‘They thrive on neglect and go on growing unfussily for years on end
(a real corker) and added that ‘the berries are out for weeks on end’, which is something of an understatement.
Not the least of their virtues, he added, is ‘no maintenance, no weeding, just an occasional prune’. Amen to that, I thought, and went out to buy young plants of them both, plus C. lacteus, C. Cornubia and C. Exburiensis.
These are tall plants, so you may wonder whether they suit a small garden. I would say, yes, definitely, provided you plant them on the boundary, where they will screen you from your neighbours. They’ll thrill you all through autumn and winter and provide a useful background to other plants in spring and summer.
Which just shows that even cotoneasters have their uses, no matter how you choose to pronounce them.