Growing Forsythia
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Forsythia is an amazing, versatile and rewarding shrub. It is so tough one can force forsythia to bloom in a vase weeks before schedule, chop it off at the knees and see it rejuvenate in a season, or clone it with mere slips stuck into a moist bit of ground. And it gets big, an in-your-face kind of big the size of a garage door. All that and late winter flowers too!
Forsythia is the one shrub everybody notices in the spring, even non-gardening types. Gardeners watch for it, little kids point at it and commuters remember it. How could you miss those overgrown bushes shrieking SPRING all over town? What gloriously obnoxious and wild swirls of traffic-stopping yellow! Most shocking, though, are the four by four foot forsythia "meatballs"! (No, I do not think forsythia is an appropriate candidate for topiary.)
Any day now, if our unseasonably mild weather continues, the forsythia will bloom in earnest in my garden. This morning I can count just three little flowers. Our forsythia blooms almost every year. Forsythia in general is a hardy shrub, but there are some forsythia varieties for REALLY COLD climates. Some years all the flower buds freeze when it gets way too cold. Some years only the buds above the snow line freeze, so in spring there is a band of flowers along the ground. (Supercooling Explained.) Sometimes there are a few stray blooms in the fall or on a warm sunny day in mid winter. I find that a bit confusing and a waste of good flower material, although there are so many individual flowers on a mature forsythia bush I suppose it's all right to tease us with a few out of season.
Worst of all and most disappointing, though, is when there are no blooms as a result of uninformed pruning. Hot tip: don't prune forsythia during the fall garden clean up -- you will trim off next spring's flower buds! Instead, if you insist on trying to make a forsythia bush look tidy, Forsythia Pruning should be done immediately after flowering.
The forsythia is the first plant I see each morning outside the bedroom window. It would not have been my first choice for that spot although I certainly look forward to that brief season when the forsythia proves beyond all doubt that winter is over. The rest of the year, when it's not blooming, forsythia is a hulking monstrosity in the landscape. That explains why it becomes a problem plant for so many gardeners. Before you bring one home, measure out the actual size of a shrub twelve feet in diameter and eight or ten feet high. Now imagine that in screaming yellow. Are you sure you really want to do this?
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