'You say Mimosa; I say Mahonia'

Picking up on the theme of recent blogs I suppose the Mimosa might for some come into the star category. Its fern like foliage is attractive, its yellow flowers are harbingers of Spring, and moreover it has a lovely, if delicate, fragrance. What more could one want? Well, like everything else it is not perfect. It looks rather a mess after flowering, and this at a time of the year when messes rather stand out since everything else is looking so fresh. Moreover in many parts of the world it is almost a weed, so freely does it sucker and self seed. This is true of the Riviera, where it has found conditions entirely to its liking and now threatens to take over the countryside. In SW France it is less happy, though certainly growable: if cut down by very cold weather a well-established plant usually grows again from the base. But in a way this makes it here more desirable than say at Menton, where I believe there is a Mimosa festival each year. Incidentally for mimosa read Acacia dealbata, the most common, probably because one of the most hardy of the family. It is in fact a huge family, mainly I think with yellow flowers, but with very different and mostly very attractive foliage. I grew for a number of years quite successfully A. pravissima with triangular almost spiky foliage, less successfully A.baileyana Purpurea with, as the name suggests, very deep purple foliage, but there are many others, sadly all a bit frost tender but well worth a try, and perhaps I should add that they come quite easily from seed, and grow very fast, which for us 'Wrinklies' is an advantage. But that said, as Christopher Lloyd used to write of certain plants, on the whole I prefer to see mimosas in other people's gardens, especially if those people are willing from time to time to give me a bouquet.

Mahonias are another matter. Apart from a certain alliteration, they share with mimosas evergreen foliage, though holly-like rather than fern-like, and yellow flowers, often fragrant. What I suppose I like about them, and perhaps increasingly so, is their architectural quality - this a description often used, so that it has become a cliche, but it is difficult to think of an alternative. Mine are just coming into flower, this of course at a time when there are not too many flowers about, so that is another plus. Sadly I do not know what varieties they are. One is almost certainly M. Winter Sun. The others were bought as Gamm Vert rejects, these well worth looking out for, especially at the L'Isle Jourdain outlet, which in my experiance has the best selection of plants, though in recent years Gamm Vert has made a big effort to improve the quality and choice of their plants. I guess more often seen are M. Charity and M. Lionel Fortescue, but I am not sure that I can tell the difference between them. They lack the strong fragrance of M. Winter Sun, but the most fragrant is M.japonica, a plant that one used to see a lot of in England, but I am not sure that I have ever seen it here, which is a pity. It is perhaps less architectural than the others mentioned, perhaps too bushy to be so described. The most architectural - Hilliers calls it "very imposing" - is M.lomariifolia, but it is slightly more tender than the others, and I think the flowers lack fragrance. I have grown two from seed, but maybe I will never see them in flower. Meanwhile there are many other mahonias, M. bealei perhaps being the most common, but not one of my favourites. There are also a number of definitely tender varieties, such as M.freemonti, which I have tried without much success; they have not exactly died, but they have struggled to such an extent that in the end I have pulled them out.

Meanwhile I feel that our autumn has been disappointing; rather long drawn-out - there are still plenty of leaves on the trees, especially oaks but then they are always late to fall - and thus not so intense. But so far we have escaped the cold and snow of Northern France, and indeed of much of Northern Europe including England. Long may this last.