It was so murky this morning that I couldn't even see the wind turbine from the bathroom window, but the rain had passed. The still, damp, not too cold air provided perfect conditions to actually be able to smell the witch hazels in the back garden. On very cold days, or when there's a stiff breeze, their scent can be pretty elusive, but there was no missing it today. Above the spicy tang of the Hamamelis drifted the insistent, sweet fragrance of Daphne bholua 'Jacqueline Postill'. The bush has thrown up more suckers since I potted the last lot up, and one of them is blooming. I saw to my pleasure that the flowers were the same as on the rest of the plant, meaning that the original wasn't grafted. I didn't think it was, as I never saw any signs of the graft, and you usually can if you look closely, but it's nice to have confirmation that my two spare plants in pots in the greenhouse are 'Jacqueline Postill' and not a nameless and inferior rootstock.
I put canes along the edge of the wood to mark the spot where they will go in a month or so, once the risk of a freezing blast in February is over. The parent plant has come through two severe winters here, but small, newly planted specimens can be vulnerable, and they have spent all winter in the greenhouse and never yet experienced a frost in their lives. I planted the Oemleria cerasiformis, and surrounded it with a wire netting cage to try and keep the rabbits and muntjac off it until it has had time to get established. It is a suckering shrub, and the boss gives its ultimate dimensions as 2.5m tall by 4m across, so once it gets going I don't think the rabbits will make much of an impact. Surveying the small tuft of sticks that is all the Oemleria runs to at the moment, and the two bamboo canes standing in for the Daphne, I tried to visualise their full spread at maturity and wondered hopefully if there was space for the plum red flowering Hamamelis x intermedia 'Livia', which we have started stocking for the first time this year. It is very handsome, and in a different part of the red spectrum to the others, and I should dearly like to grow it, but I had to admit that there probably wasn't room for one, or at least not anywhere where it would get enough light. If we have any left at work come the weekend then I may yet talk myself into the contrary position.
Daphne bholua 'Alba' is out as well. It is a pretty thing, which has only grown to half the height of 'Jacqueline Postill', and so far is not suckering at all, so could be a good choice for a small space. The wintersweet, Chimonanthus praecox, is blooming. I bought mine as the pure yellow form, but the flowers have a definite smudge of purple on the inside. It has been quite slow growing in its early years. The scent of Daphne bholua was so strong that it was difficult to detect whether the wintersweet smelt of anything or not. It is certainly supposed to. Further up the garden, Prunus mume 'Beni-chidori' has suddenly opened. The flowers are single, about the size of a penny or a little larger, in a good, clear, strong shade of dark pink. They have no scent, and nor has the lovely Lonicera 'Elisae', which is just opening its slender, tubular flowers in a delicate, tantalising shade of very pale melon pink.
After sorting out the Oemleria, I re-potted my three Acer palmatum. One existing pot had fractured and partially delaminated due to frost. I'd made temporary repairs with glue, but knew it was only a matter of time before I went out into the back garden and discovered the root ball of my poor Acer exposed to the elements, with bits of disintegrated pot scattered around it. It needed more root space anyway. I decided to re-pot the other two while I was at it, partly because they needed potting on, one badly so, and partly because I wanted to standardise on the same design of pot for purely aesthetic reasons.
I have seen the light when it comes to pot design. After a flirtation with egg shaped pots, very trendy in the early part of the new century and now so horribly last decade, I have come to appreciate the enormous, practical virtues of the traditional flower pot shaped pot, one whose diameter expands steadily from the base upwards. The design I have fixed on, with minor variations depending on the manufacturer, is the classic camellia pot, a thick walled, sloping sided pot with a couple of horizontal ribs round the outside. I presume that these evolved to strengthen the walls of the pot, as well as for ornament. The camellia pot is a design classic which has remained essentially unchanged since the Renaissance, because nobody has been able to improve on it in hundreds of years. You can see the same pots scattered through the illustrations to Monty Don's Great Gardens of Italy.
The trouble with egg shaped pots is that the diameter at the top is narrower than the widest part of the root ball. Getting an established shrub out, let alone one that has been allowed to become at all pot-bound, is a brutal job. I had to get the Systems Administrator to pull from above at the Acer that was still in an egg pot, while I scrabbled at the edges of the root system, scraping off compost until I'd narrowed the root ball down enough for us to drag it out of the pot (the alternative is to smash the pot with a lump hammer). Getting a shrub out of a flared flower pot is a comparative doddle. Once you've broken the surface connection between the mass of roots and compost and the inside of the pot, and got the root ball to slide even a couple of millimetres, the rest is easy. I did ask for help lifting a big Acer that was going from one camellia pot into a larger one, but that was a question of bulk and gravity, not pot design.
Showing posts with label pots. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pots. Show all posts
Wednesday, 25 January 2012
Friday, 6 January 2012
tempted by catalogues
The new year brings spring catalogues from Broadleigh Gardens and Avon Bulbs. I see that this year will be the last that Broadleigh exhibit at Chelsea, as owner Lady Skelmersdale has decided that 40 Chelsea exhibits will be enough. I have been to every Chelsea since the mid 1980s. If I were to go down to the garage and check my boxes of old RHS magazines I suppose I could work out the exact year I started, but I think I narrowly pip the Systems Administrator's record of continuous attendance at every Cheltenham race meeting since 1987. That means I've seen over 25 of Broadleigh's stands. They have always been wonderful, and I shall miss them. I can still remember Beth Chatto's exhibits, skilful displays of naturalistic planting, and she packed in Chelsea a good few years ago. Still, I suppose somebody has to retire to make room for new blood.
The agapanthus are tempting. Katherine Swift in The Morville Year has a clever trick for managing them in pots, which I pass on for those of you who aren't going to read the book, but might wish to grow potted agapanthus. She says that once potbound they are practically impossible to extract, so she grows them in plastic pots already slit down both sides, placed inside a second plastic pot of the same size. When she does need to get them out of their pot it just peels away. It is such a reasonable sounding idea, I would adopt it myself, if it weren't that I grow everything for long term display in terracotta, which I like aesthetically and believe it helps keep the roots cool.
The Allium tuberosum, or Chinese chives, sound nice as well. This is a late flowering, white form, excellent for wildlife, which I admired at the wildlife day at Beth Chatto last summer, as did a friend who liked it so much she bought a potful, and has kindly given me an envelope of seeds. If they germinate as readily as ordinary chives I should soon have lots. No need to buy Allium tuberosum, then.
Maybe I should have some more white Dodecatheon, commonly known as 'shooting stars' (although not at the plant centre where it is known as Dodecatheon.) It is a woodlander with flowers like drooping cyclamen. I have one, originally bought to go in the porch in spring close to eye level, so that I could admire it at close quarters, but it began to languish in its pot and was planted out by the ditch at the bottom of the garden, where it seems happier. One looks a bit lonely. Stingy, even. Maybe I should have several. The temptation always with catalogues is to want to try as many different and exciting plants as possible, when for maximum garden impact it might be better just to choose one plant, and blow the entire budget on buying lots of them (or at least several. Buying lots tends to require a bigger budget than mine).
I'm fairly sure I'll pass on the named varieties of snowdrops. They are interesting, and beautiful, and I'm happy to look at other people's, and might even try and get organised to go this year to the RHS London show in mid February, where there are always excellent displays of rare and choice snowdrops and cyclamen. But however delightful 'Ophelia', 'Straffan' and 'Green Brush' are (£7, £6 and £15 each respectively) I couldn't buy enough to make any difference at all to the garden. And they'd probably get dug up by voles when I wasn't looking, or the birds would scratch out the label and I'd lose them. Unless you have a collector's mind, and I haven't, despite loving many plants and being curious about them, a great big box of common Galanthus nivalis is a much better investment in a large, wild and woolly garden like ours. I skipped a year of planting snowdrops last year, as there were so many other jobs to do clearing up after the damage caused by two bad winters on the trot, but this year I might get some.
Avon Bulbs catalogue opens with their named snowdrops, which look equally lovely and, from my perspective, pointless. £25 each for 'Fuzz' and 'Galadriel', £20 for 'Welshway' or 'Wasp'. I think not. They have a wide selection of Eucomis, or pineapple flowers, so called because of the tuft of green leaves on top of each flower. That presupposes that they do flower, and mine didn't, last summer. I think I need to feed them, and maybe repot them into fresh compost each spring. The bulbs are slightly tender, and need to be kept dry in winter, so mine are tucked away under the greenhouse staging. I have to admit that there isn't a great deal of room under the staging, what with the over-wintering pots of dahlias, and lilies, and Eucomis, and the hyacinths that I'm keeping under cover this winter after their basal plates rotted outside last year. Better not go mad buying Eucomis, then. The alternative would be to get a second greenhouse, except that I don't have time to look after any more pots than will cram into the existing one, and I don't want to have to heat a second. At least I have a greenhouse. Katherine Swift hasn't, which means that in winter she shares her beautiful house with umpteen pots of orange trees and potted myrtles.
The agapanthus are tempting. Katherine Swift in The Morville Year has a clever trick for managing them in pots, which I pass on for those of you who aren't going to read the book, but might wish to grow potted agapanthus. She says that once potbound they are practically impossible to extract, so she grows them in plastic pots already slit down both sides, placed inside a second plastic pot of the same size. When she does need to get them out of their pot it just peels away. It is such a reasonable sounding idea, I would adopt it myself, if it weren't that I grow everything for long term display in terracotta, which I like aesthetically and believe it helps keep the roots cool.
The Allium tuberosum, or Chinese chives, sound nice as well. This is a late flowering, white form, excellent for wildlife, which I admired at the wildlife day at Beth Chatto last summer, as did a friend who liked it so much she bought a potful, and has kindly given me an envelope of seeds. If they germinate as readily as ordinary chives I should soon have lots. No need to buy Allium tuberosum, then.
Maybe I should have some more white Dodecatheon, commonly known as 'shooting stars' (although not at the plant centre where it is known as Dodecatheon.) It is a woodlander with flowers like drooping cyclamen. I have one, originally bought to go in the porch in spring close to eye level, so that I could admire it at close quarters, but it began to languish in its pot and was planted out by the ditch at the bottom of the garden, where it seems happier. One looks a bit lonely. Stingy, even. Maybe I should have several. The temptation always with catalogues is to want to try as many different and exciting plants as possible, when for maximum garden impact it might be better just to choose one plant, and blow the entire budget on buying lots of them (or at least several. Buying lots tends to require a bigger budget than mine).
I'm fairly sure I'll pass on the named varieties of snowdrops. They are interesting, and beautiful, and I'm happy to look at other people's, and might even try and get organised to go this year to the RHS London show in mid February, where there are always excellent displays of rare and choice snowdrops and cyclamen. But however delightful 'Ophelia', 'Straffan' and 'Green Brush' are (£7, £6 and £15 each respectively) I couldn't buy enough to make any difference at all to the garden. And they'd probably get dug up by voles when I wasn't looking, or the birds would scratch out the label and I'd lose them. Unless you have a collector's mind, and I haven't, despite loving many plants and being curious about them, a great big box of common Galanthus nivalis is a much better investment in a large, wild and woolly garden like ours. I skipped a year of planting snowdrops last year, as there were so many other jobs to do clearing up after the damage caused by two bad winters on the trot, but this year I might get some.
Avon Bulbs catalogue opens with their named snowdrops, which look equally lovely and, from my perspective, pointless. £25 each for 'Fuzz' and 'Galadriel', £20 for 'Welshway' or 'Wasp'. I think not. They have a wide selection of Eucomis, or pineapple flowers, so called because of the tuft of green leaves on top of each flower. That presupposes that they do flower, and mine didn't, last summer. I think I need to feed them, and maybe repot them into fresh compost each spring. The bulbs are slightly tender, and need to be kept dry in winter, so mine are tucked away under the greenhouse staging. I have to admit that there isn't a great deal of room under the staging, what with the over-wintering pots of dahlias, and lilies, and Eucomis, and the hyacinths that I'm keeping under cover this winter after their basal plates rotted outside last year. Better not go mad buying Eucomis, then. The alternative would be to get a second greenhouse, except that I don't have time to look after any more pots than will cram into the existing one, and I don't want to have to heat a second. At least I have a greenhouse. Katherine Swift hasn't, which means that in winter she shares her beautiful house with umpteen pots of orange trees and potted myrtles.
Sunday, 2 October 2011
pootling in late sunshine
The unseasonably warm weather is very beautiful, but it does slow you down. I gave the bees some more sugar syrup, recharged the wasp traps, took a car load of rubbish to the dump, moved some empty pots into the shed, watered the pots with plants in and moved more of them into the greenhouse for the winter, and that was the day done. Doesn't sound like a full day's work.
It is a terrible year for wasps (or a highly successful one, from the wasp's point of view). They were hanging around the beehives in greater numbers than I've ever seen. I managed to squash four against the side of one hive. The extra trap I put out a couple of days ago, using the last of a pot of strawberry jam, hadn't caught any at all, so I strengthened the bait with a teaspoon of blackcurrant jelly left over from 2009. In fact it still seemed quite soft and jelly like, and not at all rubbery or crystallised, and it almost seemed a waste to use it, but I do have three drawers of a large iron filing cabinet full of homemade jam, some dating back to 2008, so must be able to spare a teaspoonful.
One of the full size colonies seems to be losing interest in sugar syrup, and still haven't emptied their last bucket, though hefting the hive it doesn't feel especially heavy. I hope they have sufficient stores in there, but I have to trust them to know what they're doing. The others are still hoovering the stuff down at an impressive rate. After making up too little syrup at a time all autumn, and finding I have to heat a second batch, I have finally over-compensated and now have a pudding basin of the stuff left over, tucked away in a corner of the kitchen with a plate over it. I ought to do some basic calculations, like measuring the capacity of the feeders, and discovering what the volume of 2lb sugar disolved in 1pint water is, then I would actually know how much syrup to make up, instead of relying on guesswork, a hazy memory of what I did last time, and the conviction that it wasn't enough.
The dump was busy. There's a lot of autumn garden tidying going on, to judge from the waste arriving this morning, and quite a lot of conscientious recycling, with bits of timber, metal and glass finding their way to the right skips. It is going to be such a nuisance if it shuts. I don't know if that decision has been taken yet.
The greenhouse is filling up. I think everything will fit in, as the dahlia pots will go under the staging, as soon as their tops have been blackened by the first frost and I've cut them down. Each year is a challenge to try and improve on last year, and not put pots in places where they block my view of other plants, which always ends in things being over or under-watered. I leave narrow tracks along the floor, like animal paths in a forest, so that I can reach all parts to water and weed. Part of me itches for a larger greenhouse, which is silly, since I don't have time to care for any more pots than I already have.
A useful job that didn't take long was to glue the broken halves of a couple of terracotta pots back together. I use Evo-stik impact adhesive, and while I wouldn't depend on the mended pots to stand outdoors all year round with permanent planting, they do well enough for summer displays, or in the shelter of the conservatory, as long as their occupant doesn't have too expansionist a root system to force the broken halves apart again. It is worth wiping the nozzle of the glue carefully after use before replacing the lid, as once I managed to glue the lid to the tube. That was the end of that tube of glue, as I utterly failed ever to get the lid off again.
The least good part of this beautiful day was Radio 3. This week's Sunday morning show was as painful as last week's Breakfast show. After listening to a (very crackly) pre-war recording of a Czech performance of Smetana's Blanik, followed by tumultous applause and the singing of the Czech national anthem, Rob Cowan read out a handful of listeners' e-mails and texts about it. I really wish he wouldn't (or rather, that the R3 bosses wouldn't make him. I can't believe he wants to.) One of the reasons why I have never joined a book club is that I am dourly convinced that discussions would be couched at the level of which characters in the book the other members of the group liked. Hearing how assorted random strangers felt listening to the Czech Philharmonic's rendition of Czech patriotic music as the Nazi menace tore across Europe is about equally dull. I was so disheartened I gave up with the radio until after lunch, and then settled for Classic FM as being much less cheesy than R3 trying to be Classic FM.
It is a terrible year for wasps (or a highly successful one, from the wasp's point of view). They were hanging around the beehives in greater numbers than I've ever seen. I managed to squash four against the side of one hive. The extra trap I put out a couple of days ago, using the last of a pot of strawberry jam, hadn't caught any at all, so I strengthened the bait with a teaspoon of blackcurrant jelly left over from 2009. In fact it still seemed quite soft and jelly like, and not at all rubbery or crystallised, and it almost seemed a waste to use it, but I do have three drawers of a large iron filing cabinet full of homemade jam, some dating back to 2008, so must be able to spare a teaspoonful.
One of the full size colonies seems to be losing interest in sugar syrup, and still haven't emptied their last bucket, though hefting the hive it doesn't feel especially heavy. I hope they have sufficient stores in there, but I have to trust them to know what they're doing. The others are still hoovering the stuff down at an impressive rate. After making up too little syrup at a time all autumn, and finding I have to heat a second batch, I have finally over-compensated and now have a pudding basin of the stuff left over, tucked away in a corner of the kitchen with a plate over it. I ought to do some basic calculations, like measuring the capacity of the feeders, and discovering what the volume of 2lb sugar disolved in 1pint water is, then I would actually know how much syrup to make up, instead of relying on guesswork, a hazy memory of what I did last time, and the conviction that it wasn't enough.
The dump was busy. There's a lot of autumn garden tidying going on, to judge from the waste arriving this morning, and quite a lot of conscientious recycling, with bits of timber, metal and glass finding their way to the right skips. It is going to be such a nuisance if it shuts. I don't know if that decision has been taken yet.
The greenhouse is filling up. I think everything will fit in, as the dahlia pots will go under the staging, as soon as their tops have been blackened by the first frost and I've cut them down. Each year is a challenge to try and improve on last year, and not put pots in places where they block my view of other plants, which always ends in things being over or under-watered. I leave narrow tracks along the floor, like animal paths in a forest, so that I can reach all parts to water and weed. Part of me itches for a larger greenhouse, which is silly, since I don't have time to care for any more pots than I already have.
A useful job that didn't take long was to glue the broken halves of a couple of terracotta pots back together. I use Evo-stik impact adhesive, and while I wouldn't depend on the mended pots to stand outdoors all year round with permanent planting, they do well enough for summer displays, or in the shelter of the conservatory, as long as their occupant doesn't have too expansionist a root system to force the broken halves apart again. It is worth wiping the nozzle of the glue carefully after use before replacing the lid, as once I managed to glue the lid to the tube. That was the end of that tube of glue, as I utterly failed ever to get the lid off again.
The least good part of this beautiful day was Radio 3. This week's Sunday morning show was as painful as last week's Breakfast show. After listening to a (very crackly) pre-war recording of a Czech performance of Smetana's Blanik, followed by tumultous applause and the singing of the Czech national anthem, Rob Cowan read out a handful of listeners' e-mails and texts about it. I really wish he wouldn't (or rather, that the R3 bosses wouldn't make him. I can't believe he wants to.) One of the reasons why I have never joined a book club is that I am dourly convinced that discussions would be couched at the level of which characters in the book the other members of the group liked. Hearing how assorted random strangers felt listening to the Czech Philharmonic's rendition of Czech patriotic music as the Nazi menace tore across Europe is about equally dull. I was so disheartened I gave up with the radio until after lunch, and then settled for Classic FM as being much less cheesy than R3 trying to be Classic FM.
Thursday, 20 January 2011
is it frost proof?
A couple of pots containing camellias had split over the winter. I found new pots for the plants, and brought the old ones in to the hall to dry, so that I can glue the halves together with impact adhesive. This works pretty well, and I should get another couple of years out of them, even if I just use them for temporary summer colour rather than permanent shrubs. The split pots, plus the arrival in the morning's post of the Whichford Pottery catalogue, set me thinking about the performance of terracotta in frost.
We sell pots at work, and one of the questions we get asked is 'are they frost proof?'. They are imported from Italy for the most part, and carry stickers promising that they are 'frost resistant'. I explain this to customers as meaning that they should survive an average winter outside without damage, but that after a few years they will probably start to flake or split, and in a very hard winter like the December just gone they may disintegrate. They decay because water can penetrate the clay, and when it freezes and expands it forces the terracotta apart. There are more resistant pots around, I tell them, but sadly they are much more expensive, around a couple of hundred quid for a large pot instead of forty. With terracotta you get what you pay for. Most customers are satisfied with this explanation, and generally buy the forty quid pot.
It isn't really fair to say that Whichford are expensive. They offer a ten year frostproof guarantee, and in practice their pots last at least twice as long as that. I bought my first from them more than twenty years ago, and the only Whichford piece I have ever owned and no longer possess did not succumb to frost at all, but got accidentally run over by a truck. The cost per year of owning a Whichford hand made pot is probably no more than for a mass produced garden centre one the same size. Also Whichford's pots are more beautiful than the mass produced ones. If only the initial capital outlay were not so high! They are offering 10% off pot orders over £90 and free delivery (which is a significant charge normally, pots being heavy and bulky) until the end of the month. I ought to partake of this offer myself, if only I had £90 to spend on pots, which I haven't.
A separate cause of splitting is pots that are narrower at the top than they are further down. If the compost in these freezes the pot is practically bound to split as there is no room for the contents to expand upwards. I try to steer people away from them if they want to leave the pot outside and planted up all year. I've gone right off them myself anyway for permanent plantings as they make repotting so difficult.
We sell pots at work, and one of the questions we get asked is 'are they frost proof?'. They are imported from Italy for the most part, and carry stickers promising that they are 'frost resistant'. I explain this to customers as meaning that they should survive an average winter outside without damage, but that after a few years they will probably start to flake or split, and in a very hard winter like the December just gone they may disintegrate. They decay because water can penetrate the clay, and when it freezes and expands it forces the terracotta apart. There are more resistant pots around, I tell them, but sadly they are much more expensive, around a couple of hundred quid for a large pot instead of forty. With terracotta you get what you pay for. Most customers are satisfied with this explanation, and generally buy the forty quid pot.
It isn't really fair to say that Whichford are expensive. They offer a ten year frostproof guarantee, and in practice their pots last at least twice as long as that. I bought my first from them more than twenty years ago, and the only Whichford piece I have ever owned and no longer possess did not succumb to frost at all, but got accidentally run over by a truck. The cost per year of owning a Whichford hand made pot is probably no more than for a mass produced garden centre one the same size. Also Whichford's pots are more beautiful than the mass produced ones. If only the initial capital outlay were not so high! They are offering 10% off pot orders over £90 and free delivery (which is a significant charge normally, pots being heavy and bulky) until the end of the month. I ought to partake of this offer myself, if only I had £90 to spend on pots, which I haven't.
A separate cause of splitting is pots that are narrower at the top than they are further down. If the compost in these freezes the pot is practically bound to split as there is no room for the contents to expand upwards. I try to steer people away from them if they want to leave the pot outside and planted up all year. I've gone right off them myself anyway for permanent plantings as they make repotting so difficult.
Wednesday, 19 January 2011
witch hazels
In the past few days the witch hazels have suddenly started into flower. I looked out of the bathroom window this morning and there they were, a haze of yellow, orange and red in front of the wood. I planted my first couple of bushes in the open ground years ago, in one of the few relatively moist parts of the garden, thinking they would not like the free-draining sand elsewhere. They probably wouldn't have, but they didn't like the place I had chosen for them either, which turned out to be badly drained, heavy and stagnant as distinct from moisture retentive but open. After a couple of years I tried lifting and potting them, but the rot had set in, literally as well as figuratively, and they never came to anything. By then I had got keen on the idea of Hamamelis in pots, so replaced them, and am now up to seven, which may have to be my limit as I'm running out of space.
They are not supposed to like container life particularly, but this lot seem to be doing pretty well so far. I keep an eye on the amount of extension growth made each year, and start worrying if they stop growing. I read a very lucid account of their cultivation in an old RHS magazine, which stated something I've observed myself, that once witch hazels have stopped growing it is difficult to get them going again. They don't flower on their newest wood, so a vigorous plant should have a length of smooth unflowered twig beyond the flowering part of the stem. The flower buds look like small clenched fists, and start to develop in late summer for the following year, while the leaf buds are flatter and pointed. The oldest and largest of my collection are now in 45cm unglazed terracotta pots, which is the largest size the two of us can handle. I firmly believe in the merits of unglazed clay, and never line it with black plastic as so many garden writers suggest. Yes, it would cut down on water loss by evaporation and hence the amount of work watering, but that evaporating water is cooling the roots.
They sit well in a country garden. The leaves look very like those of native British hazel, so after flowering they blend into the background for the summer. Keith Wiley used this characteristic at the excellent Garden House in Devon when he was head gardener there. He has moved on to new projects, but his book On the wild side is worth a read, if you are interested in the relationship between gardens and landscapes. Despite their similar names, and appearance when out of flower, witch hazel and hazel are not closely related. Hamamelis are in the family Hamamelidaceae, along with Corylopsis, Fothergilla, Liquidambar and Parrotia, among others. Hazel is a member of the Corylaceae, together with Carpinus (hornbeam) and Ostrya (hop hornbeam).
My yellow and orange forms are opening ahead of the red. H. x intermedia 'Vesna' makes a splendid show, with large flowers of deep yellow. 'Orange Peel' is a more orange shade of yellow, with a red flush at the base of each petal. Both of these varieties do have the irritating habit of hanging on to a few dead leaves, so I must wizz round them with the secateurs. 'Jelena' is more coppery still, with petals shading from red at the base to orange at the tips. 'Pallida' is not yet fully out, and looks a bit sparse in comparison, though maybe the yellow flowers will expand more in a day or two. This variety is reckoned to be one of the best for scent. Hamamelis mollis, the Chinese form, is fully out, and the lemon yellow flowers are smaller than some of the hybrids, though again this is one of the best for scent. Christopher Lane has written a plant collector guide on witch hazels for the RHS, published by Timber Press, which has long been on my wish list of books, though without yet resulting in a purchase, so I can't offer you a review. He will tell you how to prune them, should their size become an issue for you, and wrote a good piece in The Garden magazine about two years ago.
They are not supposed to like container life particularly, but this lot seem to be doing pretty well so far. I keep an eye on the amount of extension growth made each year, and start worrying if they stop growing. I read a very lucid account of their cultivation in an old RHS magazine, which stated something I've observed myself, that once witch hazels have stopped growing it is difficult to get them going again. They don't flower on their newest wood, so a vigorous plant should have a length of smooth unflowered twig beyond the flowering part of the stem. The flower buds look like small clenched fists, and start to develop in late summer for the following year, while the leaf buds are flatter and pointed. The oldest and largest of my collection are now in 45cm unglazed terracotta pots, which is the largest size the two of us can handle. I firmly believe in the merits of unglazed clay, and never line it with black plastic as so many garden writers suggest. Yes, it would cut down on water loss by evaporation and hence the amount of work watering, but that evaporating water is cooling the roots.
They sit well in a country garden. The leaves look very like those of native British hazel, so after flowering they blend into the background for the summer. Keith Wiley used this characteristic at the excellent Garden House in Devon when he was head gardener there. He has moved on to new projects, but his book On the wild side is worth a read, if you are interested in the relationship between gardens and landscapes. Despite their similar names, and appearance when out of flower, witch hazel and hazel are not closely related. Hamamelis are in the family Hamamelidaceae, along with Corylopsis, Fothergilla, Liquidambar and Parrotia, among others. Hazel is a member of the Corylaceae, together with Carpinus (hornbeam) and Ostrya (hop hornbeam).
My yellow and orange forms are opening ahead of the red. H. x intermedia 'Vesna' makes a splendid show, with large flowers of deep yellow. 'Orange Peel' is a more orange shade of yellow, with a red flush at the base of each petal. Both of these varieties do have the irritating habit of hanging on to a few dead leaves, so I must wizz round them with the secateurs. 'Jelena' is more coppery still, with petals shading from red at the base to orange at the tips. 'Pallida' is not yet fully out, and looks a bit sparse in comparison, though maybe the yellow flowers will expand more in a day or two. This variety is reckoned to be one of the best for scent. Hamamelis mollis, the Chinese form, is fully out, and the lemon yellow flowers are smaller than some of the hybrids, though again this is one of the best for scent. Christopher Lane has written a plant collector guide on witch hazels for the RHS, published by Timber Press, which has long been on my wish list of books, though without yet resulting in a purchase, so I can't offer you a review. He will tell you how to prune them, should their size become an issue for you, and wrote a good piece in The Garden magazine about two years ago.
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