“Italian Renaissance gardens influenced the development of garden design throughout Europe, both in layout and in content. This influence also extended to the proliferation of new species of plants, because the first botanical gardens were in Italy. The purpose of these gardens was to facilitate the study of plants for medicinal purposes. The origins of these gardens are disputed, but they may combine elements of the physic gardens of earlier centuries and the Aztec gardens that the conquistadors had discovered in Mexico….
“The Orto Botanico in Pisa (c. 1543) was planted by Luca Ghini, who taught botany and medicine at the University of Pisa. The garden was planted with medicinal plants gathered by Ghini and his students on field trips in northern Italy. The garden soon developed an international reputation both for the range of its collections and its beauty….
From “Winter Flowering Quince” by Clara Sargent Mainwaring in A Time For Poetry: An Anthology by the North Carolina Poetry Society:
How sudden-brightly primrose pink! sun-touched outside my windowpane sturdy on your thorny stems glistening after winter rain, resting robins fresh from snow, promising that leaves will grow
“I have been making a list of flowering shrubs (those that drop their leaves), one for each month of the year. The list begins with the Chinese witch hazel, and ends with wintersweet. For February I have in mind the flowering quince; though the height of its bloom is often a month later, there are other shrubs for March, and I can think of none so colorful in February.
“The cultivated quinces are forms of two species, Chaenomeles japonica, and C. lagenaria [a synonym for Chaenomeles speciosa]; and of C. x superba, a hybrid between these two. As C. japonica is dwarf, and C. lagenaria is tall there is a great variety in habit. The flowers are white, spectrum red, and tones between red and orange. They bloom between Thanksgiving and Easter….
“C. japonica is a prostrate shrub that spreads very slowly to three or four feet. I used to have it in Raleigh in the shady rock garden, where the small coral flowers appeared freely in March, with a few at almost any time of the year….
“There are any number of good red-flowering quinces in all sizes and shapes…. Many of the red ones are English hybrids.”
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On the same day I photographed freshly blooming white quince (see White Quince (1 of 2) and White Quince (2 of 2)), I also encountered several newly flowering red quince plants, who posed for the images you see below. As with white quince, these are a mix of Chaenomeles japonica and Chaenomeles speciosa — with some stretching along stone structures and walls, and others growing as compact shrubs. I waited for clouds to move in before taking these photos — something that works well with red flowers, as red in bright sunlight can be over-saturated, leading to a loss of detail.
My previous post White Quince (2 of 2) includes an excerpt from the book Japanese Gardensย by Wendy B. Murphy — where the author mentions that the quince flowers appear before the plant’s leaves. That subtle characteristic is also reflected in the poem at the top of this post, where the poet observes that the flowering quince is “promising that leaves will grow.” How cool is that!
“In Japan the quince is admired for its fragrant, extremely early flowers, which may open in mid-January if weather conditions are favorable. A low-growing, wide-spreading deciduous shrub, it tolerates pruning so well that it is a classic subject for bonsai. In the garden, it is often pruned to a single stem and grown as a small tree. Alternatively, it is grown in rows as a hedge, its dense foliage and thorny branches intertwining to form an effective barrier.
“The Japanese quince grows only 3 to 4 feet tall, but it spreads 5 to 7 feet; the flowering quince grows 5 to 6 feet tall with an equal spread. Both species have shiny oval leaves, 1ยฝ to 3 inches long, and thorns so long they sometimes appear to be small branches. The flowers, which appear before the leaves, are 1 to 2 inches wide and bloom in clusters of two to four blossoms. On the Japanese quince, they are red-orange; on the flowering quince, they may be white, pink or red, depending on the variety. Both species produce hard round green aromatic fruit in the fall, about 2 inches in diameter.”
“By the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, planting gardens was in the West becoming an indulgent hobby for wealthy gentlemen. As developing trade links brought news of the diversity of botanical riches that existed in foreign parts, the owners of large estates vied to create the most unusual and exotic collections of plants. One such gentleman was Robert Cecil, the First Earl of Salisbury, who began developing the garden at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, England, in 1610. He employed John Tradescant as gardener, sending him to The Netherlands, Belgium, and France to obtain tulip bulbs, rose bushes, and cherry, pear, quince, mulberry, and orange trees. In doing so, he helped elevate the status of plant hunting from an enjoyable pastime to a lucrative profession.”
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This is the second of two posts featuring white flowering quince from Oakland Cemeteries gardens, one of my favorite plants to photograph this time of year since it blooms so profusely as early as January and for several months thereafter. The first post is White Quince (1 of 2).
If right in front of me, Slow motion — fast motion really — The cold branch of the quince Should all at once Start with a rash of buds Then the thin green nudge The brown back, then the color Of the waxen flower, the flame, Open everywhere the same…
“This is the plant that the public still firmly calls ‘Japonica’ as though no other flower ever came to us from Japan. No changes in nomenclature have been more justifiably resented by gardeners than those affecting this well-loved shrub; and yet the reasons for the changes are logical enough…. “The first species was found by [Carl Peter] Thunberg on the Hakone mountains in Japan, and was described by him in 1784 under the name of Pyrus japonica. In 1796 Sir Joseph Banks introduced a plant to Kew from China, which was thought (wrongly, as it afterwards proved) to be this Pyrus japonica, and it was illustrated under this name in the Botanical Magazine for 1803. In 1818 Robert Sweet noticed that it was not the same as Thunberg’s plant, and renamed it Pyrus speciosa, but by that time the name of ‘japonica’ had become firmly established and nobody seems to have taken much notice of the correction…. “In 1869 the firm of W. Maule and Son of Bristol introduced Thunberg’s original species from Japan; but as Sir Joseph Banks’s Chinese plant was still usurping its name (in spite of Sweet’s attempt at a rectification) another one had to be found, and it was christened Pyrus maulei by Dr. [William] Masters in 1874…. “It has now been restored to its rights as the original ‘japonica’ and Sweet’s name of ‘speciosa’ has been officially adopted for the Chinese plant. The other changes are explained by the fact that for a time botanists classed these shrubs as Quinces (Cydonia) rather than as Pears (Pyrus); then they were replaced among the pears, but that family, being inconveniently large, was split up into a number of more manageable sections, and Chaenomeles was chosen as the name for this particular group…. “So the old ‘Pyrus japonica’ is now Chaenomeles speciosa and the old ‘P. maulei’ is now C. japonica. How much simpler to keep to the Japanese name of Boke!”
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If you read the excerpt from Garden Shrubs and Their Histories above, you have some idea how confusing it was for me to try and figure out the names of the plants I photographed for this post (and the next one). I knew they were quinces, but wanted to try and be more precise than that; and, eventually, came to the conclusion that they are a mix of Chaenomeles japonica and Chaenomeles speciosa based on their growth habits: the first twelve photos below were taken in the same location, where these Chaenomeles japonica tumble along the top and down the sides of a stone wall stretching twenty or thirty feet; whereas the rest were in other locations where the plant presents as a compact shrub with larger, more dense collections of flowers. This may or may not be precise; but if it isn’t: they’re still quinces! And they look good in pics!
“[Just] as the [sixteenth] century draws to a close we meet with John Gerard, probably the most frequently quoted garden writer of his day. Gerard was born in 1545 and qualified as a Member of the Court of Assistants of Barber-Surgeons in 1595 and as Master in 1608….
“Gerard had his own garden, thought to be in Holborn, and his catalogue of plants, which listed more than a thousand species, many for the first time, is believed to have been based on those growing there at the time, that is, in 1596. The famous Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes was published in the following year….
“The descriptions which it gives of even the most commonplace plants are highly readable, and the style is confidential so that one might imagine that we are strolling alongside John Gerard, dressed for the part, four hundred years ago….
“Part of the attraction of Gerard’s writings lies in the unlooked for names given to familiar plants…. Leucojum vernum, known to botanists as Spring Snowflake, becomes the ‘Early Bulbous Stocke Gilloflower’…. Leucojum aestivum, Summer Snowflake, becomes ‘Early Sommer fooles or Somer Sottekins’.”
“The first of these bulbous Violets riseth out of the ground, with two small leaves flat and crested, of an overworn green colour, between the which riseth up a small and slender stalk of two hands high; at the top whereof cometh forth of a skinny hood a small white flower of the bigness of a Violet, compact of six leaves, three bigger, and three lesser, tipped at the points with a light green: the smaller are fashioned into the vulgar form of a heart, and prettily edged about with green; the other three leaves are longer, and sharp pointed. The whole flower hangeth down his head, by reason of the weak foot stalk whereon it groweth. The root is small, white, and bulbous.”
I had learned a little about John Gerard’s sixteenth-century book The Herball, or, Generall Historie of Planteslast year, and written about his delightful descriptions of anemone flowers as “winde-floures” (see Anemone, the Winde-Floure (1 of 2)). I hadn’t come across mentions of the book since, until today when I was searching for something to quote about our neighborhood spring snowflakes. The first quotation above was one of the things I found, which explains how Gerard referred to Leucojum vernum as “Early Bulbous Stocke Gilloflower” — the last word also written as “gillofloure” or sometimes as “gillyflower.”
Of course I had to see if I could find these references, which took a little digging because of the variations in wording or spelling among The Herball’s various editions that have been scanned as online books. But I did findeth them after an extended passage of time (!!), discovering a chapter where Gerard groups the snowflake variations, and — with illustrations — appears to include the flower we commonly call snowdrop among his categorization of “bulbous violets.” Here are three of the pages from his “Of Bulbous Violets” chapter, showing his original illustrations of these flowers, followed by the section John Fisher refers to above.
Toward the bottom of the third image you can see the Somer Sottekins, Sommer fooles, and Stocke Gilloflower that Fisher refers to. Just above that, you can also see a very early form of the plant genus Leucojum written as “leuconarcissolirion” — a blend of terms that appears to reflect an even earlier (or perhaps concocted) version of the genus name. Happily we don’t have to call it that anymore!
