Trees in parks and gardens 2010

[Paddy Tobin]

A few trees/shrubs from the garden today and still hoping that my Evodia daniellii's flowers will open before Arnold's, a sort of trans-Atlantic flower competition!

Abies koreana
Crinodendron patagua
Eucryphia x nymansay

[Paddy Tobin]

And, a few more. Paddy

Evodia daniellii - like the watched kettle, these flowers seem like they will never open. This is its first time flowering for me, grown from seed, and I am impatient to see them.
Feijoa sellowiana - looking a bit tatty as the flowers are going over very quickly
Hoheria sexstylosa - this tree was cut to the ground by the hard frosts of this winter but one side branch, shooting from the base, survived and is now covered with flower.
Indigofera gerardiana

[TheOnionMan]

Paddy, nice selection of trees and shrubs, some are new to me, and some are most likely too tender for my climate... I'll just have to admire them from afar.  One I did grow for a number years in a "foundation planting" in front of my house was Indigofera gerardiana (syn. heterantha).   It is one of those "pea shrubs" that dies down to the ground each year, and resprouts in spring growing quickly and producing those attractive flowers.  It was beginning to outgrow its allotted space and one spring it did not come back.  I did not fill the void as other plantings were maturing and filled in nicely.

Based on the size of your plants seen in the last photo, was some or all of the woody stems winter hardy, rather than regrowing from the ground each year?

[ArnoldT]

Paddy:

Your Evodia is not the sames a mine.  The stems of  the leaves and flower stems are markedly different.

I know there is another Evodia hupehensis


http://en.academic.ru/dic.nsf/enwiki/250794

http://www.kraeuterallerlei.de/der-bienenbaum-die-honigreiche-bienenpflanze/

[ArnoldT]

Also Eucryphia   is the source of the wonderful leatherwood honey from Tasmania.

[Stephenb]

Feijoa sellowiana - looking a bit tatty as the flowers are going over very quickly

I've always admired Feijoa when I've seen it in gardens in the UK and would love one day to try the fruit which is described as tasting like a cross between strawberry and pineapple. According to the Plants for a Future database, the flowers are also good to eat: "The petals are sweet, crisp and delicious, they taste more like a fruit than many fruits"

Do you get ripe fruit, Paddy? (I see that it ripens quite late). There are also a number of cultivars developed for the fruit but these don't seem to be available in the UK.

[Paddy Tobin]

Mark,
Indigofera gerardiana is perfectly hardy here and comfortable enough to seed about. In fact, I have to cut it back each year as it is a spreading  bush and inclined to elbow in on its neighbours.

Arnold, I'll have to "key out"  my Evodia/Tetradium at some stage to establish its identity definitely. The bees certainly enjoy the eucryphia and the flowers are covered in bees. I have a number euchrphias in the garden, even a variegated one and two pink-flowered cultivars also. I didn't realise it was called "leatherwood". I grow a north American shrub which is called "leatherwood" - Dirca palustris. Are you familiar with this one. I haven't got it to flowering size yet though I have plants for nearly ten years now and have even lost a few due, I think, to wet soil.

Stephen, On previous good summers I have had ripe fruit and found it pleasant. I wouldn't delight in the taste to the extent of the description you posted but it certainly is interesting to have it.

Paddy
 

[Gail]

Lovely pictures Paddy but you've made me miss my Hoheria.  We had the cultivar H. sexstylosa 'Stardust' at the front of the house.  I was told it would get to 6ft but it kept going and when we got subsidence problems (the fault of our heavy clay soil and a huge crack willow at the back not the Hoheria) the surveyor told me it would have to go.  This time of year it was a million honey scented stars and humming with bees and hoverflies.  It was cut right to ground level but is reshooting.....

[Paddy Tobin]

Gail,
You seem to have it planted very much in the "shade tree" tradition of USA gardens. Lovely tree.

Paddy

[ArnoldT]

The tree, Eucryphia lucida is the source of the leatherwood honey.  A must try if you can find it.

[Maggi Young]

Also Eucryphia   is the source of the wonderful leatherwood honey from Tasmania.

 I found this UK source for it....
http://www.goodnessdirect.co.uk/cgi-local/frameset/detail/672300_Rowse_Tasmanian_Leatherwood_Honey__Set__340g.html

Will be trying this out!

[Paddy Tobin]

Maggi,

I followed the link above to look at the tree and found instead a jar of honey. Ah, well, it was a sweet disappointment.

Paddy

[TheOnionMan]

Edit by Maggi:
This quote is a compilation from another thread to introduce some posts which I will move here.....

Quote from: Paddy Tobin
Quote from: alpines
It's definitely Aruncus dioicus ...grows all over Kentucky too.

Grows in Ireland too but behaves itself well. Peculiarly, my wife likes the flowers as they fade to a rusty brown, something I cannot understand and I am under strict instructions not to cut them off each year.

Paddy
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I think I do understand, it is a plant that is gracefully senescent when passing out of flower.  It reminds me somewhat of Eremurus stenophyllus... where I really liked the effect of the bright yellow flowers going over to complimentary brown.

Mark McDonough
Massachusetts, USA, near the New Hampshire border, USDA Zone 5
 ------------------------------------------------------

While I harbour a wish to grow old as disgracefully as possible myself, I have certain sympathies with plants that achieve that with some grace..... I draw your attention to a thread in the NARGS Forum (McMark knows it, already, of course) on the subject.... "Senescent with dignity! "
http://nargs.org/smf/index.php?topic=336.0


Margaret Young in Aberdeen, North East Scotland Zone 8a

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Mary regularly describes plants/flowers as "dies well" or "dies badly". She has promised me a good bottle of wine and the choicest spot on the compost heap when my time comes.


 Paddy

Mark:

When I first moved to the mild Pacific Northwest (Seattle Washington area) in the early 1980s, one of my greatest disillusions was with Camellia, a genus I always imagined growing, but they're not hardy enough this far north in New England.  This is not a blanket observation, as some species and cultivars are better than others (C. sasanqua is nice), but many cultivars have both fresh flowers and ugly spent lingering among the branches simultaneously.  One cultivar in particular, a large-flowered fully double white, had flowers that "die badly" indeed, a long season of fresh white pristine flowers, and at the same time, the branches laden with persistent mashy brown blobs of spent flowers at varying stages of decay, in no particular hurry to drop off.  

It became a staple of my garden slide presentations to show such Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Camellias, trees that are beautiful and ugly at the same time.  Maybe they have better "self-cleaning" cultivars these days?  Shortly I will show a plant I like much better, Stewartia pseudocamellia

[Rodger Whitlock]

When I first moved to the mild Pacific Northwest (Seattle Washington area) in the early 1980s, one of my greatest disillusions was with Camellia,

Those decaying brown camellia flowers are due to a fungal disease that arrived in the PacNW within living memory. Most camellia owners can't be bothered with the necessary hygiene (picking off browning flowers and carefully cleaning up any that fall to the ground), so the disease perpetuates itself once it's infected a plant.

Something like black spot in roses in terms of hygiene and control.

[Paddy Tobin]

Rodger,

This browning of camellia flowers, particularly those which flower here early in the year, also occurs after frosts and white flowers seem most prone to this damage.

Paddy