It rained. It was only dampish when I went to let the chickens out, and after breakfast when I set to pulling long dead strands of perennial pea out of the sloping bed, and chopping down the old stems of Knautia macedonica. Then it began to spit with rain, which I could ignore until it got a little heavier, when I took cover under a large cotoneaster and carried on weeding. Eventually I had to concede defeat, as it began to rain hard enough to drip on me through the branches. Alas.
I am fond of the cotoneaster, though it would not win me any horticultural brownie points. It is a large, spreading, mature specimen of Cotoneaster salicifolius 'Rothschildianus', a yellow berried form of an Asian species originally from western China. By now it must be a good twelve feet wide, and about as tall. It has a graceful, spreading habit, that is spoiled by pruning. Chop back and encroaching branch, and the shrub is likely to respond by sending a new shoot vertically from the truncated tip. I wonder about the end result when I see them sold as small standard trees to garden owners who don't want to end up with a giant lollipop twelve feet wide. Hedgehogs on stilts, I fear.
My plant would not bring me any plaudits from keen plant collectors, because it is not rare or fine enough (though the excellent Bluebell Nursery stock it, and they are plants people of high order). And it is easy to grow, one of a tribe beloved of landscape architects working to tight budgets on public schemes. Nor would it win approval from the conservation charity Plantlife, who are against cotoneasters on the grounds that they seed too readily into the wild, spread by the birds that forage on their copious crops of berries. C. salicifolius is not on Plantlife's list of four species of particular concern, but I get the impression they aren't keen on any of them. However, since we are hundreds of miles from any limestone cliffs, pavements, or screes, I don't see my plant adversely affecting them. Indeed, I have never had to weed a single seedling from around its base, so I think the countryside is safe enough.
At the moment it is laden with yellow fruit. They do, as Bluebell Nursery remarks, last for a long time because they are not the birds' first choice. In the spring it has an equally generous covering of small white flowers that are pleasant enough, though nothing remarkable. It is obliging about letting the perennial pea grow into it, and I must get some Liriope muscari to grow under it, since the autumn spikes of purplish-blue flowers would go well with the yellow berries, and the tough rootstock and evergreen leaves of the liriope would put paid to the crop of weeds beneath the cotoneaster's canopy.
A little way up the slope, my two small specimens of Callicarpa bodinieri 'Profusion' are finally covered in small bright purplish blue berries. I planted two, from two different sources, because I could not get to the bottom of whether or not I needed a second plant for pollination. Some people said yes, and others that it was self-fertile. They went into a rather nasty patch of ground where various things have refused to thrive, though a self-sown wild holly is doing very well, and for their first couple of years I was not entirely sure if they were alive or dead. I have set a Clematis orientalis to climb over the holly, which is kept clipped into a dome when I remember, and the plan is that the shiny holly leaves will make a good background for the purple callicarpa berries, and the yellow flowers of the clematis a bright colour contrast, if their seasons overlap. The clematis may flower too early, that is if it deigns to flower at all. It hasn't yet.
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