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Spring - Beauty and Beast - Part 1, Beauty

© Marge Talt

Spring has finally arrived in all its glory. It happened overnight. One week we were having a snowstorm and the next (it seems) everything burst into massive growth.

Spring is my favorite time of year - no question about it - but it's also the most frenzied time of year in my USDA zone 7 garden. Especially in years like this, when the weather doesn't let me get that much needed head start on cleaning up winter's debris. In my garden, spring is beautiful, but it's also a beast in many ways.

Beauty Before The Beast

Like a complex piece of music, plants unfold their leaves and blossoms in an ever quickening tempo. Pieris japonica is one of the first notes. All winter, its buds dangle in racemes and in a blink they open, saying that spring is here. These are lovely, slow growing shrubs in all seasons. They are evergreen, so they are always a presence in the garden. The new foliage is tinted red; the flowers are creamy white bells with a faint honey fragrance. Newer cultivars have been bred for even redder foliage, but mine is the species. Actually there are four or five plants in this group, who have been in place about eighteen years. It took them a good ten or twelve years to reach their nine foot (3m) height.

Although members of the family Ericaceae, along with Rhododendrons, Azaleas and blueberries, these Japanese natives aren't quite as picky about having really acid soil. They do want good, organic, well-draining soil that doesn't dry out, in sun to partial shade. In my area and south, shade is much better because their one pest, the lace bug, is more apt to attack them in full sun. Pieris, sometimes erroneously called Andromeda, are rated hardy from zones 5-8, but may do well in zone 4 in a protected location. You can prune them, but you need to do it right after they bloom and just as new growth starts to give them time to form flower buds for the next spring.

Viburnum x carlcephalum is the earliest of my viburnums to flower. The tight round flower balls (inset) start a faint pink in bud and open white. They fill the garden with the most heavenly fragrance. This hybrid between V. carlesii and V. macrocephalum var. keteleeri flowers well in a lot more shade than it probably likes. Dirr says it can reach six to ten feet (2 - 3.04 m). I haven't taken a tape to mine, but I think it has passed that ten foot mark. It's hardy from at least USDA zones 6 - 9.

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