Winter Jasmine

Winter Jasmine

Espaliered Jasminum nudiflorum at
Dumbarton Oaks, January 2011

On my perambulations through Georgetown, in search of winter blossoms, I discovered Winter Jasmine (Jasminum nudiflorum) espaliered against the exterior brick walls at Dumbarton Oaks.  A native of Western China, its long evergreen willowy stems are supported against the wall with nails and wire, ensuring that its small, delicate funnel shaped flowers will be easily observed by passers-by on some warmish winter day, yet to come.

In spite of the recent and prolonged cold, its buds, elongated tubes tipped with red, have appeared in profusion and some have even opened into their sunny yellowness in defiance of winter.  They are just waiting for temperatures of 50 degrees or more to pop into a cascade of small yellow flowers heralding the onset of early spring. 

I have always adored winter jasmine, (winter blooms of any kind are essential to my surviving winter).   When I moved to Connecticut and survived my first endless New England winter, I started planting winter and early spring flowering bulbs, perennials, and shrubs with abandon, and not necessarily with good design in mind, I am sorry to say.  Though winter jasmine is hardy in zones 6-9 it is a sporadic bloomer at best in zone 6, so I decided to give it a try.

Red tipped buds awaiting a warm winter day.

The most logical place (and a good design choice, fortunately) for the jasmine in my Connecticut garden was by the back door where it was protected from the cold winter wind, where I would see it every day from my kitchen, and where it could spill over a low fieldstone wall.  It’s a notorious “trash catcher”, so I have never liked to see it planted on flat ground where leaves and other litter is easily caught by the long arching branches and not easily cleaned.  I also think winter jasmine looks awkward espaliered, as it is at Dumbarton.  It’s too contrived.  Hanging over a wall or planted on a slope, however, is ideal.

Over the years, the jasmine thrived and I found its evergreen branches just as lovely in winter as the flowers themselves.  Like Kerria japonica, another green-branched shrub, the branches turn brown as they age but a little judicious pruning annually quickly takes care of this and helps rejuvenate the shrub at the same time.  My wall was too low at 18 inches, and I think it would have looked better at 3 feet or more, but a little pruning took care of this problem, too.  I was delighted to discover that the jasmine seemed quite deer proof. It suckered a little, but that ended up giving me the opportunity to dig up the new plants and share them with friends.  While it didn’t bloom well every winter, when it did, the yellow flowers, preceding both forsythia and kerria, was a source of joy.  It was especially wonderful when it bloomed simultaneously with crocus, scilla, and galanthus. 

Winter Jasmine blossom
braving the cold.

Another planting of winter jasmine near my house, much larger than mine and planted on a slope, did not bloom more than once or twice in the 17 years I lived in Connecticut, even though it was in a much sunnier location.  My conclusion was that it was much too exposed to the west winter wind and it was also never, in all those years, rejuvenated.  Lesson to those in zone 6:  Plant winter jasmine in protected places for more blossoms and prune regularly!

In my new garden here in Georgetown, a previous owner must have shared my enthusiasm for he or she planted a winter jasmine with the intent of espaliering it up a brick wall.  Unfortunately, the wall faces north and is never in sunlight.  Moreover, it is out of reach of the rudimentary sprinkler system so it’s often very dry.  While winter jasmine is tolerant of poor soils, is moderately drought tolerant, and can take some shade, this is little guy is struggling.  There’s not a bud to be seen on this poor thing.

I will have to decide whether it has a place in the new garden, both in terms of design and conditions, or if it will have to be given away to someone with a more ideal location.  Meanwhile, I will go to Dumbarton if and when the temperatures ever rise to get a mid-winter fix.

Thank god for snowdrops.

I don’t remember when I saw snowdrops for the first time but it must have been during the winter of 1992-1993 when I was working as a volunteer at Georgetown’s historic Tudor Place.  It was there, during my first garden volunteer experience, that I fell in love with so many plants, and snowdrops (Galanthus), a member of the Amaryllis family, are among those crowded at the top of the list.

When I moved to Connecticut, I discovered to my complete delight, that I had several pockets of snowdrops in my new garden.  The biggest group was in my untamed side garden where a small but dense tumult of white flowers began blooming vigorously just after the snows receded.  The winter of ’93-94 was, as I recall, distinguished by 17 snowstorms and bitter cold.  It was the first time I’d experienced  perpetual ice encrusted  snow lasting on the ground for months and, as a Seattelite, I found myself craving green and anything that bloomed.  It was a winter that made me understand the importance of a winter garden, and the appearance of the snowdrops that kept me sane.

I cautiously moved a few of the clusters  (Galanthus are easily transplanted but best moved in spring, after they’ve finished blooming – just don’t let them dry out) to places in the garden where I knew I’d see them more frequently, and left the seed heads to ripen on the rest, hoping they’d continued to naturalize, which they did.  The little sprouts look like thick grass blades and come up with the leaves of the mature bulbs.  Every fall, I’d order more galanthus (typically a G. nivalis or G. elswesii cultivar), and each spring I’d divide the larger clumps and move them to other parts of the garden.  Each spring, as I eagerly awaited the first snowdrops to open, I wished I’d planted twice as many.

I also tried to include them in every garden I designed.  When I was working with John Brookes, the international garden designer and a friend, on an estate in New York, we ordered thousands of bulbs, galanthus among them.  He urged us to pot the snowdrops up in the fall so we could plant them in the spring as we found places that were crying out for a clear winter white bloom.  In the UK, he tells me, you can buy them at nurseries in the springtime, just about to bloom, just for this purpose. 

Snowdrops, which are deer and squirrel resistant, emerge as early as late December or early January and, depending on the weather, can last months.  In the early 2000’s, when we had a few warm winters back to back, and were convinced we’d be growing palm trees in zone 5 gardens by the end of the decade (clearly a mistake, as this has been one of the coldest winters on record here in our Nation’s Capitol), my snowdrops bloomed from Christmas until March.  By this time I’d planted them along side hellebores, white forsythia (Abeliophyllum distichum), daffodils, and scilla, and through liriope and other grasses, which I’d cut back in early spring before the snowdrops appeared.  They were gorgeous in their ever-abundant colonies along the fence, in perennial gardens, under the beech tree, and anywhere else I could tuck them and where I would see them from the house or the driveway.   I also planted them on top of daffodil bulbs, figuring that as long as I was going to dig a hole, it seemed sensible to pack it with as much as I could and I did, to great effect.

I miss my old snowdrops so Sunday, as I was walking through Georgetown, I was delighted to see a tiny clump growing by someone’s front door, beside residual variegated vinca and dried leaves from a Japanese maple.  Note to self:  Order plenty of snowdrops for the new garden next fall.  I think I will plant them in planters so I can put them exactly where I want them after they’ve bloomed.

Back to Square One

Moving to a new garden (or new house with a new garden as non-gardeners might say) is wrenching, exciting, daunting.  It is wrenching because you leave behind your leafy friends, your garden pests (that fat woodchuck, the turkeys, and the deer), your dreams of what you'd like to do next and after that, and the memories of all you have done over the years.  And wrenching because you are leaving the rhythm of your garden, its’ emergence in late winter, its spring blooms, the passing of its summer flowers, the beauty of fall, the surprises of the winter garden, and the passing of birds for whom you have planted nutritious attractions.  The excitement comes when you look at your new garden, provided you have one, and consider all you can do.  You feel daunted by the prospect of creating something new in a space you do not yet know.

I have just left a two acre garden of over 17 years (in Connecticut, zone 6) for a tiny, walled, urban garden in Washington DC (at least zone 7).  It was part woodland, part formal, part crazy (the part I could never tame), with three terraces, a winter garden, a long mixed border, a small orchard, and more lawn than I ever cared for.  There was a time when I could manage it myself, but as the years passed, the garden developed, and I became ever busier with my non-gardening life, it became too much to manage well.  This is an anxiety gardeners understand -- when the untended garden means you can't relax in the space you have lovingly (okay, obsessively) created.

Before I can think about the new garden, I must grieve for the old.  I didn't think I would, but now there are many old friends I miss.  For example, I'd love to see how Jelena looks this year, for she'd grown quite a bit in the five years since I've planted her.  Jelena, or Hamamelis x intermedia 'Jelena' (Zone 5-8), is a bronze winter blooming witch hazel that has exceeded my Arnold's Promise in reliability.  Jelena was planted beside the driveway, beneath a Redbud (Cercis canadensis) that sported our Christmas lights.  About the time the lights came down each year, Jelena was already in bloom.

Jelena was an impulse buy for me.  What I really wanted was Hamamelis x intermedia 'Pallida", both for its color and fragrance.  Both shrubs belong to the “x intermedia hybrids”, which are an easy to grow group of witch hazel crosses between  H.  japonica  and H. mollis.

I fell for witch hazels the first time I’d seen them during a plant class at the U. S. Botanic Garden, and had coaxed a garden buddy to buy Pallida when I didn’t have room, delighting in it’s fragrance on warm winter afternoon visits.  I developed “Pallida Envy”, but I was impatient at the nursery when I couldn't find it.  I’d seen Jelena in a garden planted at the direction of Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd, and it was beautiful in winter along the narrow woodland walk next to which she’d been planted, so I rashly bought Jelena and brought her home.  

As a designer, I should have been more disciplined about impulse buys, and I gradually have gotten much better, but this was before I had begun to break this bad habit.  Like so many of her predecessors, Jelena sat in the driveway, unplanted for several weeks before I finally figured I could tuck her in under a Redbud.  The rationale was that her fall color would be pleasing under the surrounding oaks and sugar maples, and I would be able to see her bloom, the first shrub in my garden to do so in the new year, when I walked to get the paper on cold winter mornings (and in Connecticut, there were many mornings that required additional incentives to walk out in the freezing cold). Unfortunately, she doesn't show up well against the diverse background in this particular setting (it's better to plant her where she's close by and against a solid green background), she isn't very fragrant, and her growth habit (upright, with the potential of a 12 foot spread and 8 foot height) meant she soon exceeded the space I'd allotted, a problem that solved itself when part of the Redbud died.

I know Jelena is blooming now, above a sheet of snow and I wonder if anyone will notice.  As I think about my new garden, I toy with the thought of adding a witch hazel, but unless I espalier it, it will be too large…..but an espalier is possible.  When I get to the designing stage, I will consider one – and if I decide to go for it, will hold out for “Pallida”.

New Year’s Resolution.  No more impulse buys.