Spirea

What’s blooming in the area: Locust, tea and miniature roses, snowball, yucca, wisteria,, yellow columbine, fern-leaf globemallow, loco weed, tansy mustard, hoary cress, white evening primrose, bindweed, western stickseed, goat’s beard, common and native dandelions; three-awn, rice, needle and cheat grass; buds on saltbush; seeds on June grass; ragweed and Russian thistle emerging. A man was discing his field on Thursday
evening after the rains; two were clearing weeds by hand from a furrowed field yesterday.

In my yard: Spirea, iris, flax, vinca, small-leaf soapwort, snow-in-summer, coral bells, winecup, pink evening primrose, Mount Atlas daisy, perky Sue; buds on beauty bush, oriental poppy, hollyhock, sea pinks, pinks, and fern-leaf yarrow; seed pods on Siberian pea tree; Illinois bungle flower, baptista, leadplant, tomatilla, and purple ice plant emerging; rugosa rose, caryopteris, Russia sage suckering.

Bedding plants: Snapdragon, sweet alyssum, petunia, marigold, gazania, Dahlberg daisy.

Inside: Aptenia, kalanchoë; bougainvillea, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: First grasshopper of the season, bumble bee on iris, ladybug on saltbush. Small yellow bellied birds have nested in the front porch soffit and now retreat to the peach tree when I’m out to yammer about their territorial rights.

Weather: Finally some real rain on Thursday; that evening when I crested the ridge into our valley, the cottonwoods and Siberian elms were an undulating mass of brilliant emerald green hummocks along the river where they were filling out. 15:23 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Bees don’t work in the wind and neither does spirea. This is the second year my flowers have all been to the leeward, hidden between the blue-green leaves and the garage.

Spirea is not particularly well adapted to this climate for the notched leaves demand water. Before the drought of 2003, someone at Santa Clara had a hedge edging the road. That dry summer, the 3' bushes turned brown in July; the following year, only a few shrubs near the house had leaves. This year there are no flowers on the few green branches that poke up among the uncut dead ones.

The bare root I ordered in 1995 never broke dormancy. The potted shrub I bought locally in 1996 didn’t survive the winter, but the one I got in 1998 did so well I added four in 2000. I had put the first at the garage corner where it got some water from the roof. The new bush at the other corner has done well, but is about half the height of the first which has yet to produce branches heavy enough to flex. The ones that depend only on me show more bare ruddy branches than ones with leaves.

This rose family member’s ancestors are native to the well-watered parts of China. Spiraea trilobata sojourns near and above the Huang Ho which flows through Shaanxi with only 15" of precipitation a year to Jiangsu with an average annual 32" minimum. Spiraea cantonensis grows in northern Jiangxi along the Yangtze where winter temperatures don’t usually fall below freezing and annual rainfall ranges between 56" and 72".

The first, with its yellow-brown twigs, was introduced into Europe in 1801. The other, also called Reeve’s spirea, arrived in 1824. It probably was sent to England by John Reeves, a tea inspector and naturalist with the East India Company in Canton who purchased many of his plants from the Fa-tee nurseries. Both were grown by Joseph Breck in Boston in 1851.

Billiard et Barré offered a cross around 1862 that combined the habits and coloring of the one with the vigor of the other. Louis Van Houtte promoted it from his great nursery enterprise near Ghent. A generation later, in 1888, Burpee was advertising Van Houtte’s shrub as "the most showy of all the Spireas, and one of the very best shrubs in cultivation." By 1914, Wilhelm Miller pronounced it the most popular foundation shrub on Illinois farms.
When I lived in Michigan in the early 1980's, many of the white frame two-story houses in Ypsilanti built on high basements to accommodate coal furnaces were fronted by mature shrubs that reached above the foundation line to spill out branches lined with small heads of tiny white flowers like so many billowing layers of tulle.

Bridal wreath may have arrived in the valley with mail order catalogs, but the houses where it grows are ones built after World War II when the national lab brought prosperity to the area. One person on the farm road has a specimen sprawling near a block wall while another has a thick, upright shrub near a wooden fence. In the village, one person has four neatly pruned canisters dotted by flowers along a chain link fence and one plant too small to train.

I planted my hybrids by the garage because spirea smells - not like a hyacinth or a rose, but with a strong distinctive odor that I can detect when I’m a foot away from the five-petaled flowers. This year mine have been attracting skinny insects no more than 1/16" long that apparently don’t mind strong vapors. That’s a good thing because bees also stay home when it’s cold or wet.

Notes:
Breck, Joseph. The Flower-Garden, 1851, reprinted by OPUS Publications, 1988.

Burpee. Cited by Gerald Klingaman in "Vanhoutte Spirea," 2003, available on-line.

Efloras.org, Flora of China, includes location information for cantonensis,vanhouttei, and trilobata.

Miller, Wilhelm. The "Illinois Way" of Beautifying the Farm, 1914.

Rehder, Alfred. Manual of Cultivated Trees and Shrubs, 1947, provides introduction dates,

Photograph: Spirea, 17 May 2008.