Gardening Basics - Monthly Tips

Monthly Tips

April - Plant of the Month

Small Spireas

During the winter, when the spireas are just a tangle of tiny twigs, you wonder why you keep them around. Then the sumptuously colored leaves appear and you remember.

Spireas are a diverse group of deciduous shrubs. Some are smallish, others largish. Some are grown for their flowers others for their foliage. Clearly, today I'm concerned with the ones grown for their delightful leaves. There are a number of cultivars but new leaves are generally golden or orangey-red and seem to go with everything.

Up the street is a garden with a couple of Spiraea 'Magic Carpet's. To these they've added a Berberis darwinii (see March 2009 for more on this beauty) a shrubby dogwood with yellowy orange twigs (probably 'Cornus sanguineous 'Midinter Fire'). The reddish orange of the spirea's leaves are echoed in the verticals of the dogwood stems and in the deeper hued bells of the barberry. Furthermore, the dark leaves of the berberis form an excellent backdrop for the fiery spirea leaves. The fact that the same color occurs on such different parts of the plants makes the grouping more compelling.

The golden leaved spireas are also excellent mixers. The gold contrasts well with burgundies or purples; you could set up color echoes with one of the yellow-flowered evergreen barberries (B. verruculosa doesn't get too big.) and a yellowtwig dogwood like Cornus sericea 'Flaviramea'.

In my opinion there is one major downside to these plants - the flowers. They are pinky-mauve and they just don't work for me up against that foliage. Sometimes I just cut them off. The shrubs themselves are pretty easy-going. They like sun to part shade and moderate summer water. My only pruning is the occasional flower beheading or thinning out a few older branches to lessen congestion. Most reach 2-4' and get a bit wider.

If you plant one of these spireas ignore the mess of twigs in the winter (judicious placement helps with this) and hold fast to the memory of the bright leaves echoing throughout the garden announcing that spring is here.

Candling a pine? What can I be talking about? It sounds like I'm planning to set up some pine tree for a potential conflagration but really candling is just a method of pruning that only works on pine trees. We're talking seriously specialized pruning here; the Japanese have been doing it for a looong time.

So here's how it works. The new growth on a pine is called a candle, because that's what it looks like. All the growth, every needle for the new year is contained in that little bundle. If you catch it at the right time, after the candle has reached its maximum length (or close to it) and before it hardens and the needles come out, you can snap it with your fingers. If you want to have no new growth on a branch, you break off the whole candle. Half a candle, half the new growth. Pretty slick.

You can't use pruners to snip off part of the candle of you'll also snip off the tips of some of the needles. However, if you snap the candle with your hand, the needles left behind just bend and the tips don't break off. It's really quite cool and a very enjoyable way to spend an afternoon. All you need your pruners for is to remove any problem or dead branches.

The key to candling is timing. Other pruning may have a best time but really if you're pruning correctly you can prune when you've got the time to do it, but not with candling. You've got to be paying attention and get the candles when they've lengthened but the needles are still in the candle. The horticulture department at Edmonds Community College is doing its pine pruning class at the beginning of May this year so make sure you're watching your pines by mid-April.

So if you've got a dwarf pine, spend a peaceful afternoon practicing an ancient pruning art. Both you and your pine will be pleased with the results.