Thursday 5 March 2015

order out of chaos - eventually

The Japanese apricot Prunus mume 'Beni-Chidori' is in full flower.  Common plant names can be misleading: Japan's gardens have been borrowing from China for centuries, and the Japanese apricot is actually a native of western China.  It has small, brilliant pink flowers, which the normally reliable Bluebell Nursery says are scented, though I've never noticed any perfume from mine.  Still, we all differ in our sense of smell, so I'll only start worrying if I stop being able to detect things I used to be able to smell.  Apparently that can be an advance indicator that your brain is deteriorating.  What a cheerful prospect.

This is my second specimen.  The first was bought as a delightful mop headed mini-standard, and I intended it to live in a pot near a camellia of a similar, somewhat lighter shade of pink that is also in flower now.  But most of its branches died back one winter, a mystery explained when I read a comment in a book by Stephen Lacey that it was not the most reliably hardy tree.  I'd been wondering if the graft had failed.  Then I found some for sale that were just trained as normal trees, and bought one, shoehorning it into a border where there's a gap in winter.  In summer the space is taken up with a riot of perennial sweet peas, but fortunately the almond doesn't seem to mind being over-run for a couple of months in July and August.  Its own foliage is very dull by then, and seems to attract every sap sucking insect going so that its leaves get distorted and rather horrid, so I'm quite happy for it to be camouflaged, so long as the pea doesn't kill it.

It has not shown any ill effects so far.  On the contrary, it has grown quite appreciably.  A few random twigs have died back, but overall it looks pretty happy.  I must go and cut the dead wood out, and take a deep sniff to see if I can detect this beautiful almond fragrance while I'm at it.

It may be the fate of early flowering plants in domestic gardens run by hard pressed owners with no outside help to preside over scenes of disorder.  It would be nice if 'Beni-Chidori' could arise above a tranquil scene of mown grass and neatly trimmed borders, all ready for the year ahead, its little pink flowers speaking to the pink camellia on the far side of the top lawn, and the paler pink of viburnum 'Charles Lamont' down by the ditch.  It would be very nice, but instead it gets as a backdrop a lawn scattered with rose branches I've been pruning out, mostly dead, the cut stems of the stooled paulownia, numerous bags of Strulch left in a trail round the edges of the beds ready for me to use, three green plastic buckets, one large black builders bucket, a stepladder, a tub of fish, blood and bone, assorted hand tools and the pole loppers.  Likewise in the front garden the dwarf iris have been blooming heroically against a background of fifty glaring white bags of Strulch, and the Henchman which for one reason and another has not been put away since we got it out in September.  (I know that was a long time ago, but with the Systems Administrator's frozen shoulder, my sprained wrist and our respective colds, there has never been a good time to move it).

At least we don't open to the public, so there is no looming panic of a deadline date by which we have to be tidy.  That would be hell, though some people enjoy it.

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