Daphne bholua

The flowers on the Daphne bholua 'Jacqueline Postill' are opening.  I'm pleased about this after the cold weather, as it provides proof that the shrub is still alive, and anyway I shouldn't have liked to miss them.  The buds are held in clusters at the end of fairly stout twigs.  They are a middling shade of mauvy pink, opening to pale pinky mauve, darker on the reverse.  The four petals are quite fleshy, and glisten slightly, their texture reminding me of African violets.  'Jacqueline Postill' is generous with her flowers, not one of those plants where you have to peer deep into the depths to discover one or two blooms, so the overall effect is quite showy.  Best of all is the scent, rich, penetratingly sweet and carrying far from the source so that you get wafts of it while working in other parts of the garden.

The habit of growth is strongly upright.  Mine after several years is over two metres tall, but less than that across.  Books give the ultimate height as up to 3m or more.  It does sucker, so unless you removed the suckers it would get wider in time.  I succeeded in potting some up couple of years ago, but am not entirely sure if the parent plant was grafted, in which case they would be straight D. bholua and not the named form.  I couldn't see any traces of a graft, but they haven't yet flowered and shown what they're capable of.

I also have the white form, D. bholua 'Alba' (Latin shouldn't strictly be used as a variety name, so this must have been named a long time ago, although the species was only introduced to Western horticulture in the mid part of the twentieth century).  So far it seems slower growing than 'J. Postill'.  The latter is a more popular variety, to judge from the number of suppliers listed in the RHS Plantfinder, and the relative number of enquiries I get at work.  'Jacqueline Postill' has been championed by Roy Lancaster, someone whose opinions on the worth of a shrub I take very seriously, and it is the only D. bholua form to hold the RHS Award of Garden Merit.  I don't know if 'Alba' is difficult to propagate, or if there is just less call for it, but at the plant centre we haven't been able to source any so far this season.

The daphnes grow in the lower part of the garden, where the soil is a mix of sand and silt and the water table is high enough that creeping buttercup grows enthusiastically in the lawn.  The contitions might even be described as moist but well drained, circumstances that are not often easy to arrange in a part of the world where rainfall averages about 525mm (21 inches).  They get sun for all but the first part of the day, and are fairly well sheltered from the wind.  They seem happy so far, and 'Jacqueline Postill' in the first few years put on growth quickly.  This is my second attempt at growing it.  The first plant was positioned further up the garden in sandier soil and exposed to more wind.  It died.

According to W.J.Bean's 'Trees and Shrubs Hardy in the British Isles' the bark of D. bholua is used for making paper in its native Himalaya.  Maybe fibrous bark is characteristic of its family, the Thymelaeaceae, as the bark of daphne relative Edgeworthia chrysantha was traditionally used for the same purpose in Japan.  In Greek myth Daphne was a nymph who, to escape the pursuit of Apollo, was turned into a tree, but rather confusingly for us now that was into a laurel, not a daphne.