January

Wintersweet – Chimonanthus praecox- is the flower of the moment, without it I think we might pack it all in. The smell is more uplifting than any other flower at any time of year, being a polished, profound, perfumier’s Jasmine. Julian first fell in love with Wintersweet when he came across it at a house outside Barcelona thirty years ago. He found a whole hedgerow of it in a wild part of a terraced garden and the family let him cut long branches to fill the back of his Citroen ‘Safari’. Such a gem hereabouts in January remains as astonishing year after year. We bought our first plant from an old fashioned one man band nursery near Wickwar, he was one of many such gifted gardeners who ran small nurseries. He appeared to spend his life pottering in some dilapidated greenhouses, chopping up plants, rooting them, potting them on and eventually selling them without any fuss. He would have rooted softwood cuttings of Wintersweet sometime in the summer. Having planted it near the back door of our last house, we waited seven years for the plant to reach flowering age and it flowered on the day our eldest son was born, January 11th 1989. C. praecox probably has the strongest scent. It is hardy and so easy to grow and we like the way it looks nondescript the rest of the year.

Almost as thrilling but in a very different way are the shredded witch hazels. The flame coloured ones have the edge but are soon followed by the lucid yellow Hamamelis mollis ‘Pallida’, whose scent is strongest, clean, in a pleasant way, as a dispensary. Picking flowering twigs from young plants is almost a crime as they grow at a glacial pace, but one of us always succumbs and the other feigns horror. It is worth it though to enjoy their oriental glamour on the kitchen table for a week.

We found a grassy mound of Iris unguicularis when we came here, sheltered in the driest sunniest side of a bay window where there was nothing else at all. Having it is like a mini adventure to its native home in southern Turkey and Syria, you can pick a cigar shaped bud now and bring it in to watch fragile grey-lavender flags unfurl.

We both like the bareness of January, the Eric Ravillious quality of bear branches and brambles. It is a time which makes one think mostly about structure and scent – not show. There are curious pleasures to be found like the ghostly papal purses of last years ‘Honesty’- Lunaria annua. All the work done in the garden before Christmas is like preparing a battery of fireworks, everything packaged up tight in an arsenal of bulbs and buds. Quietly, but inevitably, buds fatten in January. The magnolia, the tree peony, the lilac buds are more and more noticeable, hazel catkins lengthen in the barely lengthening days. Everything in the garden, you realise, is in readiness for the coming show, even if we are not.

Monday, January 26, 2009