Garden Centre

Friday, September 28, 2007

Katsura

Forgive me if I’m boring you, but I’ve got trees on the brain right now.

This is a Katstura from Japan – it’s not the best looking tree you’ve ever seen, I suspect, and it does have some disadvantages in the garden appearance stakes – for example, the trees often produce several trunks, especially if they’ve been exposed to ground frost when young and the leaves are not exactly pretty in autumn, but let’s leave all this aside.

In winter you can see tiny bright red flowers and then in early spring rounded heart-shaped bronze leaves emerge. During the following weeks they will become greeny-yellow and then pea-green, as they become wider and flatter.

But it’s the autumn that makes these trees so special. The foliage colour changes – several gardening books say it becomes a dusty pink and/or creamy-yellow, which mine certainly doesn’t, as you can see. Mine goes bright gold with crisp brown edges! But it’s the smell that matters – again the horticultural tomes say it’s like burnt sugar or caramel which can be picked up on a calm day some distance away. And I say they are wrong: it is exactly the smell of candyfloss and I took this picture in heavy rain with a strong onshore breeze and I could smell the wonderful sugary aroma quite clearly – no need for a calm day in my garden! Strangely though at close quarters, the leaves do not smell.

For those who care about such things (like me) Katsura, along with the Ginkgo, once flourished in much of the world before the Pleistocene glaciations which reduced it to a relatively tiny population in Japan and the intervening region of eastern China – unlike the Ginko, this tree has not won worldwide renown. I have no idea why, and urge you to do your best to spread it over every continent – for its smell alone, this tree is worth planting.

Labels: autumn colour, garden trees, katsura tree, tree plantring

The All Seasons Gardener at 7:30 AM

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