The Essence of a Garden

　　What makes the loss of the ptelea particularly surprising is that a number of other small trees thought to be more fragile came through with flying colours. Fraxinus ornus, the Manna Ash from southern Europe, with some shelter from spruce trees on the west side of the Western Triangle, lost not an inch at the top, though it seems to have lost a lower twig or two to deer. It is unlikely, given its provenance, the fact that it is a member of the olive family and its May flowering time, that we shall ever see the “showy, creamy white flowers.” Never mind, says Hugh Johnson (The International Book of Trees, the flowers “are only half the story. The whole tree is so voluptuous in glossy leafage that…it stands out in staid parkland like the velvet-framed bosoms of Nell Gwynn and her contemporaries on ancestral dining-room walls.” Even at my age, that’s a cheery thought.

Three other trees are worth a mention. I first saw Aesculus pavia, the Red Buckeye, flowering in the Leonard Buck garden in New Jersey almost twenty years ago, and have longed ever since to be able to grow it. It is a native of the southern United States, a small tree eventually to about 6m, with deep crimson flowers in typical horse-chestnut racemes in June. The buckeyes, both the Ohio and the Yellow, have thrived here, but pavia has been a struggle even though it has the protection of the north fence in the Nursery Garden. This spring it has grown forcefully for the first time, and even though it is less than 2m high, its foliage is striking. The Ohio and Yellow buckeyes flowered well this year, but our Horse-chestnut had not a single flower.
Yet the past winter cannot have been harsh. I am permitted to be definitive on that because Stewartia pseudo-camellia, a tree that meets all of Henry Landis’s criteria, is also about to reveal the bonus.