This week it’s: Wonderful witch hazels
I’VE always had a soft spot – albeit a cold one – for witch hazels (forms of hamamelis). In the depths of winter, when there is precious little other garden colour available, they produce their spidery, richly coloured flowers on otherwise bare branches.
The earliest appear well before Christmas (as with Hamamelis virginiana), while the later ones will still be doing their thing in early March. As we are now slap bang in the witch hazel season, there is no better a time to look at some of their stories.
■ Because hamamelis bloom on bare branches, they will always benefit from a dark background: when lit by the winter sun, the flowers really stand out.
Idiosyncrasy 1: the flower
CLOSE up, the witch hazel flower is intriguing. Technically, each one has four thin, ribbon-like petals up to ¾in (2cm) long, but as the blooms come in small clusters, it appears as though there are many more spidery petals to each flower. They are extremely hardy, too,
