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May 12, 2005
What's Blooming 5/12
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This time of year a number of quiet, un-flamboyant shrubs light up the understories of our park woodlands. Later in the season, once their flowers are spent, they can be hard to distinguish as they recede into the green monochrome. But right now a walk through any large park reveals a host of delicious-smelling, unusually shaped blooms.
If you are in a park and catch a whiff of strong spicy fragrance, it could easily be coming from one of the many viburnums in bloom at the moment. Viburnums come in so many shapes and sizes that our policy here at Citygardenguide is when in doubt, guess viburnum! Viburnum carlesii, burkwoodii and juddii all have a very strong fragrance and waxy, snowball-shaped flowers. The Doublefile Viburnums which are just now coming into bloom have little scent but are the most spectacular of the bunch, with pure white, flat cymes held above the leaves and a horizontal, tiered branching habit. Michael Dirr, whose Manual of Woody Landscape Plants is the bible of ornamental shrubs and trees, says, "a choice specimen of Doublefile Viburnum is without equal", and he's right.
Fothergilla is another shrub that is planted throughout the parks. A mid-sized native, it has oval leaves and bright fall color. Like most plants, it does better in the sun, but it performs adequately in quite a lot of shade, and is much used in the understory in Central Park. It has perky bottlebrush-shaped, creamy white flowers that smell strongly of honey.
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The Cherry laurel (Prunus laurocerasus) also has upright bottlebrush-shaped white flowers and also smells sweetly of honey. It can survive the deepest shade and keeps its leaves (although they are rarely unblemished) all winter. It is an invaluable, if slightly boring, shrub. But it keeps a nice, mounded form and we here at Cityardenguide think the smell is divine - Dirr calls it "sickeningly fragrant" (he's wrong). There are lots of huge, billowy specimens in Central Park, but around town they are usually compact and between two to three feet high and wide. A walk across the plaza in front of the Vivian Beaumont Theatre at Lincoln Center, where the trees are underplanted with cherry laurel, is an olfactory treat this week.
Posted by gardenguidenyc at May 12, 2005 10:12 PM