The week started off rather negatively but it has got better. There is still the promise of rain. I am up at Garden Show Ireland in Antrim so I am sure it will rain here even if it is still dry at home in Wexford. The tender jasmines are in bloom and I was watering in the conservatory and noticed that the vanilla orchid has flower buds! I was never, in my wildest dreams, expecting it to bloom. More on that later if a gibbon or some other exotic pest doesn’t eat the buds.

But back out in the garden, the styrax is in bloom and it makes me smile. It is a replacement for the first tree I put here. In the early stages of the garden, when the bed was just grass, I made a silly decision and planted a Davidia. I have always liked them and in those heady, optimistic days I thought it would be a good idea. There was a fifteen-year-old davidia at work and it was just starting to mature and bloom so I knew I had to plant early! But I splashed out and bought the new ‘Sonoma’ which is very precocious and flowers at an early age. The trade-off is that it is very expensive. And of course, it died.

A year or two later the bed was established and improved and I needed to plant something else. The spot is an important one because it is at the end of a main vista. And I chose a styrax. These elegant trees have rather horizontal branches dripping with fragrant, white, five-petalled bells. Now I was really searching for a pink one, such as ‘Pink Chimes’ but then decided that, apart from the fact that getting one was proving difficult, I really preferred the more natural ‘white’.

So a ‘normal’ Styrax japonicus was planted. Styrax is a large genus with more than 100 species but few are grown in our gardens. They have a wide distribution, including Asia and North and South America but only S. japonicus, from China, Japan and Korea is at all common. They all tend to need warm summers and average, slightly acid soil. Styrax japonicus is hardy but can be caught by late-spring frosts – mine does. The site is largely sunny but protected by a hornbeam hedge that offers some shade to the young plant but it is growing above that now. Strangely, the young leaves seem to be very attractive to snails and I often find a large snail in the branches, but that may be to get a better view of the hosta ‘Empress Wu’ beneath upon which it can them hurl itself !

The flowers dangle delicately from the branches and it just gets better as it gets bigger and you can look up into the constellation of blooms.

Styrax japonicus was widely cultivated in its countries of origin before it was introduced into the West in 1862. It typically makes a small tree though it can reach 10m high in favoured gardens. There are many cultivated forms, though they are hard to find, and include dark-leaved and pink-flowered forms, variegated plants and some with weeping or dwarf habit. But, just for once, I am very content with the tree as nature intended, for now at least.

styrax japonicus