I am not sure whether the Mount Etna broom in the front garden is alive or not. As an experienced gardener I feel I ought to be able to tell, but bits of it are green, and bits are not, and whether it is on its way out or just resting for the winter is a puzzle.
I've been worried about the broom since the exceptional storm just over two years ago. The whole shrub was left slightly tilted by the force of the wind, and I feared that this did not bode well, since members of the pea family notoriously don't like having their roots disturbed. A Buddleia 'Black Knight' in the back garden was blown clean out of the ground by a really bad storm in 2002, a year after it was planted, and after I'd planted a replacement the first one regenerated from the roots so we now have two, but I did not think the broom was going to be similarly resilient.
Come the spring it came back into leaf, however, and flowered, and did the same last summer, although leaning further and further across the pond. I pruned off some of the downhill branches last year and some more this, trying to restore some balance and make it more upright. I've been trying to thin out the number of branches since it was a baby anyway, since while the Genista aetnensis in the gravel garden round at Beth Chatto's have made nice, smallish trees, our broom has always been infuriatingly multi-stemmed and bushy.
The distinction between leaves and twigs in a Mount Etna broom is not clear to the naked eye at the best of times. The leaves are so narrow they look almost like twigs, while the young stems are green. As autumn came this year and the broom shed its load of leaves into the gravel, I didn't like the way some of the twigs had turned brown. When I flexed them experimentally between my fingers they snapped, for they were dead and tinder dry.
Peripheral dieback in a shrubby plant is rarely a good sign. For a tree or shrub to discard the oldest branches, those low down or buried deep within the crown that don't get much light, is pretty normal, but when the most recent, freshest growth that's getting plenty of light goes and dies on you that rings alarm bells. Particularly in the case of the broom, because its roots were rocked so badly by the wind a couple of years previously. On the other hand, the branches at the base are still green and sappy. I know this because I sawed two more off that were hanging right down over the pond, rather expecting it to be the beginning of a major clearance session with bow saw and pick axe, and was halted in my tracks by clear evidence of life.
The best I can do is to leave it until spring and see if it surprises me for a third time by coming back into leaf, or whether by then the main stems are as dead as the twigs. All is not lost if the broom does die, since it has left a number of progeny seeded into the gravel. The largest is up to the three foot mark, and the smallest still only six inches tall, all of them a bright, dark green and unambiguously alive. In a few years I'd have a little grove of Genista aetnensis. I had thought about potting them up when they were very small, but left it because I knew they disliked root disturbance and now I'm glad I didn't.
There is also the complication of the self seeded rose, which had just begun to get going growing up into the broom and was showing me how it ought to be done when ramblers are left to choose their own spot. It is almost evergreen, with white flowers and extremely healthy foliage. I didn't intend to have a rambling rose in the middle of the front garden, and am slightly nervous about how large this one might grow, but after an early and unsuccessful attempt to dig it out I haven't tried again because I am so impressed that any rose will grow that well in sand that hasn't seen any organic mulch for a decade that I haven't liked to destroy it. Its roots are neatly tucked in close to the original broom and its branches are naturally following those of its host, quite unlike my struggle to persuade 'Paul's Himalayan Must' that it wants to go up the wild cherry in the back garden. Persuading the rose in the gravel to transfer its affections to a new host, and keeping it in check while the seedling brooms got large enough to support a climber, feels as though it could be a long project.
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