Winter gives way to burst of pink petals
The Japanese apricot is a small, twiggy tree that blooms in winter, even if no one is looking. By the time its cousin, the flowering cherry tree, blossoms, the apricot display is history.
The problem with winter flowering trees and shrubs is that they are jerked around by warmth and frigidity so that, at best, you get a trickle of blooms that lack overall punch. At worst, a tree bursts into full bloom only for the entire inventory to take a killing hit.
Some years are better than others. For the Japanese apricot, this winter has proved a banner year. The early freeze kept the buds tight and gave them the chilling period they need. The recent extended balmy spell produced an explosion of color and fragrance.
Old Japanese apricots can get to 20 feet. The Prunus mume is so attractive a tree, so amenable to the small garden, that you wonder why everyone doesn’t have it.
Well, the answer is that most people notice tree varieties at garden centers when the merchandise is in full bloom. No one thinks to visit a garden center in February, even if it is open.
The Japanese apricot does produce fruit, by the way, but it’s bitter and barely edible. The culinary apricot blooms a month later but is a needier plant.
Besides its spraying needs, the fruiting apricot points to the worry that
comes with plants that flower at the tail end of winter.
But the Japanese apricot and its February ilk are of a different order. They always have taken their chances with midwinter freezes, and their precariousness is understood.
What they do demonstrate is that spring stirs far earlier than we imagine and has been in the works for weeks before everyone wakes to it.
When you see a lone Japanese apricot in flower amid the dormancy of the winter landscape, the impulse is to think of it as an outlier. The more familiar you become with winter bloomers, the more you understand that the apricot is in pretty abundant company.
If you consider seasonal stirrings beyond blooms, you get an even stronger sense that more than two months after the solstice, the natural world is awakening. Look closely at the buds on many shrubs and trees, and you will see their scale casings parting to make way for new growth. This is quite evident on rosebushes. (If you haven’t done your annual pruning yet, grab some thick gloves and the pruners.)
But back to the Japanese apricot. There are a number of varieties with distinct blooms and growth habits, though they tend to be upright and arching and the blooms are smaller and less relaxed than flowering cherries, so the effect is a little stiffer. Some deft pruning would make them more graceful.
If the strong color of Matsubara Red is too much, a variety named Kobai is a more restrained red-pink with prominent stamens that quiet the color further. Among the soft pinks, Dawn is a popular variety. Hana Kami and Peggy Clarke each have layers of rosepink petals, but the latter is fuller and softer.
The tree recedes in presence in the growing season, with reasonably attractive yellow fall color. There may be winters when you wonder why you lent precious space to a Japanese apricot, but not this year.
Edgeworthia is another East Asian beauty in need of greater use. Happy in full sun or partial shade, it is a brassy shrub that will grow to about five feet high but more than that across after a few years. Its blue-green foliage, when it leafs out, is both cooling and tropical in mood. It is now full of large and fragrant blossoms, with none of the coyness of the apricot’s. The buds are conspicuous for weeks before they open as clusters of tubular florets in orange-yellow or red, depending on variety.
Another big-boned early bloomer should be used more. The Japanese cornel dogwood (Cornus officinalis) grows as a large twiggy shrub or small tree and in time develops peeling orangetan colored bark. It blooms a little earlier than a better-known close relative, the corneliancherry dogwood (Cornus mas), and is smothered in globular yellow blooms. Finding retail sources of the apricot, edgeworthia and especially the dogwood may be challenging because of their blooming schedule, but the internet stands ready.
The quest is worth it. Each of them has the power to alter our perception of when the growing season begins, and to convey all the uplifting feelings of renewal, hope and anticipation that comes when life begins again.