Wednesday 8 May 2013

This, That, and the Other

Recently two plants have caught the eye in our garden, - Ceanothus Puget Blue and Malus Prairifire. I assume that ceanothus are much bought in our area, and certainly you can find a very wide selection of them for sale at for instance le jardin d'emballage at Mirande. But with the exception of the ubiquitous C. repens you do not actually see very many, or is it just that one does not get to see many gardens ? Be that as it may, the 'Californian lilacs' that I have grown do seem to flourish, enjoying not surprisingly our dry, hot summers, and rather more surprisingly putting up with our winter wet. In a cold winter they can be damaged, but here at any rate in the bad winter of 2011-12 all mine recovered despite having looked rather dead for quite a long time. Along with C.repens we growC.Concha,  C.Dark Star, C x delileanus Comtesse de Paris, C.Joyce Coulter,  and C.Skylark. C.repens is not to be despised despite the fact that it is so common - a good deep blue and the fact that it provides an attractive evergreen wide spreading bush excellent for covering a dry bank makes it very acceptable. Also wide spreading is C.Jane Coulter, again a good blue, but with rather less regular form. Not so long ago C.Concha was what I have called in previous blogs a 'celebrity', or 'must have' plant to be found at every plant fair in some quantity. I am not quite sure why this was the case: a slightly darker blue than some, but otherwise not all that different, but nothing wrong with it.  C x delileanus Comtesse de Paris is summer flowering  and not evergreen. I prefer it to the more common C x delileanus Gloire de Versailles because I prefer darker blue, and I actually dislike the for me dirty pinks of the summer flowering C. x pallidus with names like Marie Simon and Perle Rose. Still by and large all ceanothus are good news for us Gascon gardeners, but for me the queen of them all is theaforesaid C.Puget Blue. It has the most intense blue of them all with even a touch of purple, and as one catalogue I consulted remarks it is in flower a long time.

As for the genus Malus, which of course includes the edible apples, M.domestica, we have planted M.coronaria Charlottae, M.coccinella, M.Nicoline, and M.Pairifire. 'Charlottae' was perhas the most important choice of tree that we have made, since four of them screen the facade of the house, and as I look out of the window at them, at this moment in full flower, I would say that we did not do too badly. The colour is what I call a Quince pink, better perhaps called blush pink. The flowers are supposed to smell of violets but even in sunshine it is faint, and with our current overcast weather non-existent. Like all malus it bears fruit, in this case bright green and about the size of a golf ball. In a not too dry summer they would be very attractive, but in a dry one they drop all too soon.  But the leaves are attractive at all stages including autumn colouring.  So a very good tree, though not all that easy to find.  A Gersois nurseryman I consulted recommended M.Red Sentiinel and M.Evereste, the latter seemingly the most commonly available malus, with the result that being a self-confessed plant snob I have foolishly avoided it - but lots of white flowers and bright orange 'apples'.  Meanwhile I seem to have not very deliberately favoured , with the exception of 'Charlotte', those with deep red flowers and reddish leaves. None of them is more than two meters high so it is early days, but this spring at least it was as mentioned above M.Prairifire that caught the eye most.

I have actually grown one or two malus from seed including M.toringo subsp.sargentii which gets a very good write up from Hillier, and indeed from Adeline but they really are too small to make any judgement about them, but as with the ceanothus they all seem to be good news for our gardens. In my last blog I commented that flowering cherries were difficult to find down here, perhaps because they do not like our dry summers. But given the very wide choice of flowering 'apples' we cannot complain too much.

Meanwhile as a postscript I must just mention Rosa morlettii, looking marvellous at this moment. I now have a group of five - they are very easy to make cuttings from but you can buy them at Yan Surguet's Les roses anciennes de Talos - incidentally a very good website. Some people are sniffy about the flowers - Quest Ritson states that they are "seldom attractively shaped and are almost sentless" - but what is outstanding is the combination of the strong purply pink of the flower with the dark purple tinged foliage. Moreover although it is only once flowering, though this over a long period, it has wonderful autumn colour as well as berries. In other words it is a shrub for all seasons, since even its stems in winter are quite attractive.