Calendar Says It’s Winter, but Blooms Scream Spring
Bleary-eyed at best, most plants are just waking up from their winter snooze. Buds are forming, bulbs are pushing up and a few fall-planted annuals like Iceland poppies are already in bloom.
But some shrubs and trees are wide awake--at their peak even--blooming with titanic, springlike sprays of flowers.
Designer Bob Cornell brought me a bucketful of unusual flowers the other day, and though the calendar says it’s still the middle of winter (as does the weather), his Pasadena backyard says it’s spring. Loudly.
Two kinds of acacias, two types of cestrums and a heather spilled out of the pail.
Add these to the tea trees, magnolias, fruit trees and vines that are flowering now, and you could make a uniquely Southern California garden whose best month was February, or even January! And that’s not counting perennials like bergenia or helebores, which are also in full flower.
Many of these started blooming in January, or even December and most are still going strong. If you wanted to add some to your garden for some powerful winter color, you can still shop for them now. You could even plant between storms so they’d get nicely watered in.
The most spectacular shrub in Cornell’s bucket, and backyard, is the so-called Scotch heather, Erica canaliculata, a real misnomer since this heather is from South Africa. It’s sometimes called Christmas heather, a much better common name, since that is when it blooms, though the flowers last into early spring.
It’s an upright shrub, about 8 feet tall by 5 feet wide. Huge, flower-laden branches spray outwards, “almost begging you to cut them,” said Cornell. And you should cut them, to keep this shrub from becoming gangly. They last a week or two in the house.
Loose, Open Shrub
The cestrums are also shrubs, not tidy and dense like a camellia or a privet, but loose and open in a tropical kind of way. They’re from Mexico and South America and should be in more Southland gardens.
Cestrum elegans ‘Smithii’ is nearly always in bloom but in winter it peaks with masses of tubular, coral-pink flowers. It grows to about 8 feet by about 6 feet wide, and branches tend to flop.
This is a plant that could benefit from a sturdy stake for support; pruning is necessary to give it some structure--a good excuse to cut big sprays of flowers and bring them into the house.
Gary Hammer, at Desert to Jungle Nursery in Montebello, says he cuts the older branches completely to the ground once in a while to keep plants tidy.
He recently collected an even brighter version of this cestrum, which he’s selling as ‘Huatusco Pink’ since it is from an area near that Mexican town.
He found it in an interesting forest where oaks and liquidambars grow with bromeliads on their branches, and heliconias down below--a fascinating mix of temperate and tropical plants.
There, it grew as a sprawling understory shrub in dense thickets. He says this one needs afternoon shade inland and that most of the cestrums tolerate some shade, great news for us shade-plagued gardeners.
The purple Cestrum in the bouquet is smaller, and sprawling, growing about 5 feet tall but being wider than tall in Cornell’s backyard. Branches arch outward with deep red-purple, dangling flowers.
Sprays of Yellow
Acacias used to be a common sight in California, but are seen way too seldom today. The problem is that they are somewhat short-lived and haven’t the roots to support them in strong winds or heavy rains.
“It’s kind of annoying,” said Cornell, whose pearl acacia, Acacia podalyriifolia, is still upright because it’s leaning on his neighbor’s tool shed.
The flowers, however, are elegant and the blue-gray foliage equally handsome. It’s a small multi-trunked tree or large shrub, about 12 to 15 feet tall so is easy enough to stake. Cornell--whose Los Angeles company, Robert Cornell and Associates, does garden design, construction and maintenance--uses hefty 1 1/2-inch diameter galvanized pipe to stake things like this because wood stakes rot so quickly.
The other acacia in the bouquet becomes too big to be permanently staked. Acacia baileyana flowers just after the pearl acacia and can grow to 30 or 40 feet. In February it’s a spectacle of yellow.
This acacia makes a handsome tree for many years, though they do have a history of dying at around 15 years, or of toppling or breaking in winds. Plant them out of the way (or out of the wind), keep them on the dry side in summer and let them grow as multi-trunked trees, and they should do better than that.
The real drawback to all these winter bloomers is that they are not common nursery fare. They may take a little looking for, though Desert to Jungle Nursery is a sure source for the cestrums.
Much more common are some of the other winter bloomers that would round out a hypothetical garden that peaks in February, like the leptospermums or tea trees, the Geraldton wax flowers, the wisteria-like hardenbergias, or winter-flowering jasmines.
There are many more, so many that I suspect our actual winter lasts for only a couple of weeks in November and December. By January or February, spring has arrived, at least in some Southern California gardens. Check out a nursery to see if I exaggerate.
