Hamamelis 'Jelena'

Of the several witch hazels in the garden, this remains my favorite. If it has a fault, it is that it could have a better fragrance. There are two of these in the garden, and neither is big enough to allow me to cut big bunches of blooming branches - yet.

Goodbye January 2010

An unexpectedly heavy snowfall yesterday has buried the garden. I was careful to cover the cold frames the day before. The low tonight is predicted to be about 12º F; early this morning it was about 10 º F. The snowfall however is a blessing: scattered here and there around the garden there are snowdrops more or less in bloom. The snow will protect them from the worst of the extreme cold.

I’m inclined to say that the best herbaceous plants for winter effect in our climate are Helleborus foetidus and Arum italicum. The former gives the correct impression that something is actually happening. The latter is so improbably lush whenever the temperature is above freezing that it brings on the very incorrect impression that the garden is not just sprouting but actively burgeoning.

Among woody plants, big plants of wintersweet are not to be scoffed at, but how rarely we see them in local gardens. Most gardeners are not aware that in our climate this is eventually a tree, not a shrub. Years ago I came across an old, neglected planting of Chimonanthus praecox which had been allowed to grow into the natural tree form of the plant: they were so large that I did not recognize them at first. The name wintersweet is very apt: the scent of this plant is very free on the air, much more so than that of the witch hazels. Lucky the gardener whose wintersweet has reached a size which allows free cutting of the branches in the winter.

But among woody plants the best for winter visual effect are the witch hazels. They are hardier than the wintersweet and offer a wider color choice which ranges among various yellows and oranges into rusty, ruby- and garnet-reds. Our appreciation of the flowers is much enhanced when the plants have a suitable background, for instance the foliage of some broad leaf evergreen. Ideally this background should be placed so that the witch hazel can be viewed with the sun to one’s back.

The one in the photos above is the cultivar ‘Feuerzauber’ (say foi-er-tsau-bear) which originated in the early twentieth century in Weener, Lower Saxony, Germany according to the account in Bean (Eighth Edition, fully revised). In modern German the witchhazels are sometimes called Die Zaubernüsse (from the words for magic and nut).

The big view image was made today: later, as the temperature rises, the petals will unfurl more and the overall effect will be better. But I’m not complaining! The close up is from 2006.

Sprout season

We’re entering the part of the year that I think of as sprout season. The ground is now erupting here and there with little green points. Some plants, some snowdrops in particular, are already blooming. For the next two months the weather will be up and down, back and forth, unpredictable and mercurial. Although spring itself does not begin until the end of the third week of March, much of what we think of as the spring garden flora will bloom during this period. The locally native flora in general waits until April.

The next two months will see snowdrops, winter aconites, the early squills, glories of the snow, reticulate irises, crocuses, the earliest tulips and lots of odds and ends blooming.

We don’t have a term in English for this season, but Karl Foerster used the German term Vorfrühling to name it. This is the season of hybrid witch hazels. In the garden today, Hamamelis ‘Jelena’ is in full bloom. This was named for Jelena de Belder over a half-century ago; she died as recently as 2003. Also in bloom today is Hamamelis ‘Feuerzauber’. There are others in the garden, and these will come later if they are going to bloom this year. The witch hazels here tend to alternate between years in which they flower very freely and years in which they flower little if at all. For instance, ‘Pallida’ this year has very few flowers; last year every twig bloomed.

Helleborus foetidus is now on the verge of full bloom: the earliest blooms are open, but the best is ahead of us. The inflorescence of this plant is a vivid, tender, pale green which is improbably lively for this time of year. To my way of thinking, of herbaceous plants which bloom at this season it’s the best.

This morning while walking Biscuit I noticed the really handsome effect produced by the low, early sun on the densely budded masses of Magnolia stellata branches. The buds of this species are gray and hairy: they catch the light beautifully. The gently mounded outline formed by these plants really lights up nicely under the right conditions.

The zoysia lawn was mowed about two weeks ago; this was done to keep it tidy looking. I cut it very low, and the dense, neatly cut brown stubble is very handsome now. In some lights it has an unexpected orange-brown tint. Zoysia is an acquired taste, and I’ve definitely acquired it.

Witch hazel two-for

I was standing in the kitchen the other day absentmindedly looking out over the garden. An unexpected cloud of yellow caught my eye: hundreds of soft yellow witch hazel flowers were blooming. The yellow was unexpected because the witch hazel which grows in that position is the orange-red cultivar ‘Feuerzauber’. What I was seeing were some maturing sprouts from the stock on which the named cultivar had been grafted.

If someone had told me about this happening in their own garden, I probably would have suggested that the yellow flowers were those of Hamamelis virginiana, a species sometimes used as a stock for choice cultivars. But now that I’ve seen these in my own garden, I wonder. Hamamelis virginiana as I know it as an element in the local flora has much smaller flowers than the ones I’m seeing on the plants now in bloom. But what other Hamamelis would be blooming at this time of year with plain yellow flowers?