pineapple broom (Cytisus battandieri)

The pineapple broom, Cytisus battandieri, is flowering.  The common name in this case is very apt, because the flowers do smell strongly of pinepapple, albeit to my mind a slightly elderly one edging towards the over-ripe.  The individual flowers are clearly members of the pea family, keeled like lupins, and are held in spikes like miniature lupins around 10cm long.  The leaves are trifoliate meaning each leaf is made up of three leaflets, like a giant clover, covered in hairs making them silky to the touch, and giving the plant a silvery appearance.  The yellow of the individual flowers is bright and brassy, seen close up, and in other circumstances I might not like it, but the greyness of the leaves softens the overall effect, which is of a graceful greenish-grey bush with illuminating flashes of colour, rather than a harsh block of bright yellow.

It wants to form a multi-stemmed shrub.  When I first got my plant I intended to grow it in the conservatory, thinking that it would look good in there and believing it to be slightly tender, as it comes from Morocco.  My aim was to train it as a standard, with a mop head on a single stem, but the Cytisus was having none of that.  It obstinately threw up fresh growth from ground level, until I had to give in, and plant it outside.  That was in the summer of 2000, and it has now made a shrub 3m tall and more than that across.  It is still sending up new stems, and pruning consists of cutting out any old ones that have died.

Given that it made it through the winters of 2009-10 and 2010-11, and is still alive and blooming madly, I think my fears about its hardiness have been shown to be unjustified.  The boss has one at work, grown as a wall shrub, but mine is freestanding in a windy corner of the front garden.  The wood gives some shelter from northerlies, and we did plant a field hedge around the boundary when we moved in, but if we had realised quite how windy the front garden at the top of the slope was going to be, we'd have sacrificed some internal volume from the garden layout and gone for shelter belts as well as the hedge.  It's too late now, so the pineapple broom has to take its chances being buffeted from all directions.  It doesn't seem to be brittle, unlike some shrubby members of the pea family such as Robinia, and branches rarely break off even in gales.  It does get full sun, as recommended in the textbooks, and it is on very sharp, fiercely free-draining soil.  It might be that given a heavier site it would struggle with winter damp, I can't say from personal experience, but in a dry garden it has been tough, and relatively long-lived.  It is deciduous, with nothing to offer in the way of autumn colour, and the winter twigs look like a heap of dead sticks, but it is good enough in flower, and in leaf for the first part of the season, that I rate it pretty highly.  The Royal Horticultural Society agree, and have given it their Award of Garden Merit or AGM.  The BBC in their writeup say it is one for experienced gardeners, but I've found it perfectly straightforward, if not downright forgiving, as being started off in a large pot and having your new growth chopped off before being turfed out into the garden a year or two later is not the best start in life.