My wife Haruko accompanied me to the nursery last Sunday; it was cold though sunny, but in any case she wanted to prune one-gallon maples inside the greenhouses while I worked on the liner sales list in another greenhouse. Five minutes into my task I took off my coat, and in another five my sweatshirt came off too. We were the only two at the nursery, which is usual for a Sunday in March, and neither of us considered our effort as “work.” Eventually we tired, though, and decided to call it quits. As we headed to the car Haru asked if the Camellias were still in bloom in our “hot house,” GH23.
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| Camellia lutchuensis |
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| Camellia 'Night Rider' |
“Yes, they are,” so I wheeled her around to show off my floral wares. When I cracked open the greenhouse door she exclaimed “Woah!,” and was nearly bowled over by the fragrance. The perfume mixture was heady indeed, but with so many species vying for attention the smelly cocktail couldn't be individualized. One strong contributor had to be Camellia lutchuensis which was near the door. Its simple flowers are small, cup-shaped but cute, and my six-foot-tall specimen displayed at least a hundred blooms. I'll never plant it outside since it originates in the warm clime of Okinawa and Taiwan. My start came from the Rhododendron Species Botanic Garden in Washington state, and I'll bet they have it successfully planted out in their more-benign garden. The tender Japanese C. sasanqua is a completely different species, but Haruko notes that C. lutchuensis is commonly known as “hime (dwarf or princess) sasanqua.” The Luchu islands fall under the administration of the Japanese government, at least for now, and Luchu is an old name for the Ryukyu Kingdom. Haruko's best friend from youth abandoned hectic Tokyo and married a fisherman from one of the islands in the 700-mile Ryukyu archipelago (which extends from Kyushu to northeastern Taiwan). There, her children have been raised barefoot and she leads tourists on snorkle trips where they actually find Nemo fish,* the cute little creature from the Disney movie.
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*The delightful pescatorial swimmer is known as the “clown fish,” Amiphiprion ocellaris, and also commonly known as the “anemone fish” because they live with sea anemones. Get it?:anemome – a nemo me.
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| Edgeworthia 'Gold Rush' |
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| Edgeworthia 'Akabana' |
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| Edgeworthia 'Red Dragon' |
Other sweet stinkers in GH23 are a trio of Edgeworthia cultivars: 'Akabana', 'Red Dragon' and 'Gold Rush'. Botanists, horticulturalists and nurserymen – including me – disagree or are clueless as to what species to assign to each of the cultivars. To complicate matters the orange-red flowering 'Akabana' appears identical to 'Red Dragon'. Are they both the same cultivar, and even in the same species? Proposed designation would place 'Akabana' in the chrysantha species (Dancing Oaks Nursery) while 'Red Dragon' should be a member of the papyrifera species (Gossler Farm and Nursery). The Hillier Manual of Trees and Shrubs(2019) proclaims that E. chrysantha Lindley is thespecies, and that E. papyrifera Siebold and Zuccarini is merely a synonym. I don't know, but Gossler in The Gossler Guide to the Best Hardy Shrubs describes the odour of E. chrysantha flowers as “lightly scented”– I consider them strongly scented– but in any case he says of E. papyrifera: “The flowers are small and golden yellow, but sadly they have no fragrance.” I wish Gossler and Hillier would get together, without rancor, and come to mutual conclusion. I have listed them variously throughout my career, and while not certain of the correct specific epithet, I suppose that E. 'Akabana', which means “red flower” in Japanese, was renamed by a Westerner as 'Red Dragon'. Too bad, as we already have other 'Red Dragon' cultivar names such as the popular Acer palmatum 'Red Dragon', 'Dionaea muscipula 'Red Dragon' and Persicaria 'Red Dragon'. One thing for certain is that 'Akabana' is a correct name, but unfortunately some have blundered it into 'Akebono' which has an entirely different meaning.
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| Michael Edgeworth |
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| Maria Edgeworth |
Well, all of the above Edgeworthia are blooming now, both inside and outside of the greenhouse. The genus in the Thymelaeaceae family was named by the Swiss botanist Carl Daniel Friedrich Meissner (1800-1874) for Michael P. Edgeworth, an Irish botanist stationed in the Bengal Civil Service in India, and/or for his half-sister, the writer Maria Edgeworth. How interesting...that the sweet-smelling Rhododendron edgeworthii was also named for the Edgeworths.
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| Rhododendron edgeworthii |
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| Rhododendron edgeworthii |
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| Rhododendron edgeworthii 'Bodnant' |
With its pleasant odour Rhododendron edgeworthii would attract you to the genus even if no other species does, albeit with the caveat that it is barely hardy in Oregon. I consider it another hot-house denizen where you hope that your heater doesn't fail. The species was first discovered and introduced by Sir Joseph Hooker in Sikkim – now considered northern India – in 1851-1853, and later as Rhododendron bullatum by George Forrest in 1904. Blossoms are usually white, but a particularly attractive pink form was selected at Bodnant Garden in Wales which is equally as perfumed.
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| Rhododendron 'Coastal Spice' |
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| Rhododendron 'Coastal Spice' |
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| Jim Gerdeman |
We also grow a nice hybrid ('Coastal Spice') developed by the late Jim Gerdeman who maintained an arboretum along the central Oregon coast, a relative banana-belt location that contains a number of barely hardy ornamental species. The parents of 'Coastal Spice' are R. (fragrantissum x burmanicum) x R. edgeworthii, and none of those species improves the hardiness at all. I've been to the Gerdeman garden just once, but I plan to revisit this spring. He was a Professor of Botany at the University of Illinois before retiring to more horticulturally-friendly Oregon. When I say “friendly” I mean climate-wise. Unfortunately his garden was bedeviled by a zealous neighbor, an eco-terrorist I guess you would call her. She considered Gerdeman's exotic collection a threat to the well-being of Oregon natives, and grew particularly irate when he grubbed out native understory brush to make room for his exotics. When he wasn't around she would sneak onto his property and remove labels entirely, or sometimes move an identification label onto a different species. If you look up “smug” in the dictionary her righteous mug appears.
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| Osmanthus delavayi |
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| Osmanthus delavayi |
Osmanthus delavayi is flowering in GH23 and I agree with Hillier that it is “One of China's gems. A very beautiful, small-leaved species, slowly growing to 2m high and more in diameter, and bearing fragrant, white, jasmine-like flowers profusely in April. China (Sichuan, Yunnan).” Mine is bearing flowers in the greenhouse now, and that is one of the benefits of a heated greenhouse, that the plant collector receives an early spring (four-to-six weeks earlier), then the real spring later out in the garden.
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| Daphne odora 'Maejima' |
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| Daphne odora 'Maejima' |
The specific epithet for Daphne odoraspeaks for itself. The evergreen shrub is the most fragrant of all the Daphnes, and it's not surprising that the Japanese/Chinese species is popular in western landscapes – where hardy (USDA zone 7) of course. Due to its intoxicating fragrance, one should plant it next to the house door, or at least next to a well-traveled path. The month when it is in bloom and emitting fragrance more than makes up for its boring-bush appearance thereafter. To improve the situation, the deep pinkish-purple flowering evergreen presents us with a cultivar ('Maejima') that features yellow margins on its emerald-green leaves. The shrub is particularly effective in a shady position, and I have a wonderful specimen planted under a large tree of Acer palmatum 'Orange Dream'.
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I quizzed my wife on the meaning of “maejima,” but I hated to do so because she groans with my translation assignments. Nothing is so simple, nothing is so clear, but she points out that jima means “island” and maemeans “front;” so what then – the front island in a group? She doesn't know, or won't say. We are now 20 years into marriage and I have learned to not push her into explanation performance. She will explain, or not, whatever she chooses. Hmm...she did say that the “maejima” name could refer to a place name, as in Maejima Island in the (Land of Sunshine) Okayama Prefecture, Honshu, in the northern part of the Inland Sea. According to a travel website Maejima Island is a national park: “Also called Midorijima Island (Green Isle). Visitors are treated to beautiful sunsets from a spot selected for inclusion in the 100 most beautiful sunsets in Japan. Cabbage fields can be seen in winter.” Haruko promises to take me to Maejima one day, but due to my age we'd better go soon, and wouldn't it be great to see the other 99 “most beautiful sunsets?” I can pass on the fields of cabbage however.
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I have been to a number of arboreta that feature scent gardens where the blind can receive olfactory stimulation, and they are often accompanied with braille signage. The blinds' brains would surely explode if they entered GH23 on a sunny March day. Neither Haruko nor I needed the blessing of sight, as we were both exceedingly whelmed with the power of aroma.
