January 2010 newsletter

Hello and happy new year (belatedly) With the temperature a few degrees above zero for the first time for weeks, there was a positively spring­like feel in the air today, encouraging a tour of the garden.

I was gratified to see the snowdrops not only well up but showing a glimmer of white, with not a hint of damage from the recent snows and hard frosts. I don’t grow the ordinary Galanthus nivalis, which I prefer to see scattered beneath the hedgerows on my regular drive towards the A5, but the green­leaved G. elwesii, larger in all its parts. It may just be my imagination, but I fancy the flowers are a slightly cleaner white – certainly I find the bright glossy green leaves more refreshing than nivalis’s dull grey.

I noticed that my Osmanthus decorus, a handsome evergreen with dark green pointed leaves, is looking a bit leggy, no doubt because it is shaded by a large apple tree. A hard prune should sort it out, but I’ll delay that till late April, by which time it should have flowered. Attractive as the shrub is in its own right – in a quiet way – the flowers are the whole point. Insignificant they may be, clustering close to the stems and largely hidden by the leaves, but the scent is one of the sweetest in the garden, and a prune now would deprive me of that keenly anticipated pleasure.

The big star in my garden at the moment is the Chinese birch, Betula albosinensis ‘Septentrionalis’, which no doubt would be better known but for its fearsomely cumbersome name. The birches are widely trumpeted for their value as winter features, as it’s at this dead time of the year that you really take note of their interesting bark. I wouldn’t bother planting the silver birch (Betula pendula), if only because it is so widely grown as a roadside tree. The white­stemmed Betula utilis varieties are deservedly popular, but the Chinese birch goes one better. Not only does it achieve a perfect shape, with a teardrop­shaped crown, but it has excellent autumn leaf colour, a rich butter yellow. But the bark is the main attraction, a soft cinnamon pink rather than the stark white of B. utilis.

At least, it is supposed to be cinnamon pink. Inspection of mine revealed that the trunk is blotched all over with green – the beginnings of lichen, which I take to be the result of dank air settling around the plant. I could wipe this off, but I think I’ll wait a week or two, after which I’ll be able to peel off the paper­like outer coating of the bark to reveal the pink below – one of the nicest jobs in the garden. The early catkins, which will soon be dangling from the stems, are also a delight (I always intend to cut some for the house but can never bring myself to do so). A first­rate tree all round, in fact, and supremely tolerant of my heavy wet limy clay – I’ll look for a nice picture for my blog.

Have a great month Andrew andrewmikolajski.com BLOG: andrewmikolajski.wordpress.com