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I realise I’ve been enjoying the smugness of the winter gardener these past few weeks. For all the attention the season’s been getting of late (no small measure of thanks for this due to
’s Wintering and Naomi Slade’s The Winter Garden, to name but two), it still feels as though an air of exclusivity envelops those of us who appreciate its finer points; a cold, but inwardly warming secret kept by a select few band of the hardened and hardy, wrapped up to the eyeballs against the weather while more sensible souls gaze out of the window, nonplussed. But that’s part of the delight and most, if not all, of the smugness – we know how wonderful winter can be, revelling in its quiet clarity and solitude. Not to mention its scent – there’s a full on olfactory assault right now, as the cold air carries the message of perfumed flowers far and wide in an attempt to attract the few pollinators brave enough to contend with hibernal hardship in pursuit of a bite and a sup, and the gardener’s schnoz gets caught up in it all.Christmas box (Sarcococca confusa) is the first and the finest here, filling the air with vanilla and burnt sugar, either to send off the old year or welcome in the new, it’s all the same. The flowers of Viburnum x bodnantense ‘Dawn’ don’t throw their fragrance quite as far except in the right conditions, though with the sarcoccoca being nearer the house and taking up so much of the nasal bandwidth, it’s hard to work out quite what those might be.
The sarcococca is a favourite plant of mine – I love the generosity of its scent, the effusiveness of its evergreen foliage, the way this year’s white flowers hang alongside last year’s black berries. Its slightly chaotic vibe. The viburnum, I realise, is not – certainly not a plant I’d hurry to put on the same list, which makes me wonder a couple of things. Firstly, should we fill our gardens only with our favourite plants? Is that not one of the reasons we have a garden in the first place? And secondly, and not entirely unrelated, is there another degree of favour, a notch or two down from ‘favourite’, by which a plant gains admission, and lays claim to a coveted spot within the beds and borders? I begin to think that must be the case.
The viburnum feels like something of a curio, one I deliberately planted, and this reminds me that I sometimes see the process of making a garden over time as not that dissimilar to the actions of a museum’s curator, as they assemble a collection of interesting specimens, each with their specific features of note. It’s the route to garden followed by the plant collector, and it often finds itself at odds with a design-led approach since the dominant energy is one of fascination, even acquisitiveness, rather than a quest for harmony and simplicity. A garden filled with single iterations of many different plants tends to generate significantly more visual noise than one that relies upon repetition, with multiple instances of the same plant achieving a soothing kind of aesthetic rhythm. It’s something that took me a while to learn and even longer to begin to redress in my own garden. The viburnum, arriving in the – what did I write a week ago on this subject? – second wave of shrubs that I planted, got here at a time when I was actively studying and wanted to be surrounded by examples of the plants I was discovering each week. Though was not a plant I first met as a twig in a college plant ID session. I remember one January afternoon in a shady churchyard, being assailed by an unknown scent and following my nose to an inelegant, twiggy shrub whose bare stems where covered in clusters of tiny, pink and white flowers. It seemed a little confused to me – surely leaves come before flowers, and I’d yet to meet wintersweet (Chimonanthus praecox), witch hazel (Hamamelis x intermedia), Persian ironwood (Parrotia persica) or winter honeysuckle (Lonicera fragrantissima), each of which exhibit an eagerness for pollination which takes precedence over the business of growing foliage. That comes itself in time, the viburnum unfurling fresh, green, corrugated leaves tinged with red, held on scarlet stems, right around the moment when a tired winter begins its tussle with the incoming spring. This, I recall, is the signal to prune it; right after flowering – not that I want to do this too hard or too often, as it flowers on old wood. Ah!
AH!
{sound of penny, dropping}
And here’s the thing… not just old wood, but two-year old wood. I realise I have gone in too hard on this plant that needs its venerable old structure in order to put on its finest winter show. Devoid of leaves, it is an ungainly thing that needs a covering of blossom to detract from its grey angularity, earning its place with the same. I need to let it be (or at least, remember that I decided not to, with the implications that would have for winter), and let it do its thing.
And it’s now, when I spend some time in the company of a plant and meditate upon its features and proclivities, that I remember why I invited it here in the first place. And the whole notion of a list of second class curios, the ‘fond ofs’ rather than ‘favourites’, gets knocked on its head, within minutes of entering mine. We grow up together in the garden, the plants and I, mistakes and all. They’re all favourites, for their own reasons, and I’m pleased to have had the chance to remind myself of the fact.
We had Sarcococca outside the front door at the barn where even I (practically anosmic) would catch faint whiffs. I’m adding it to my list for the ‘big empty border’. Thank you!