Ask John Negus
John has been answering reader queries for 50 years
Can you name my mystery trees?
Q Could you please name these two trees for me? I bought them some time ago and have forgotten what they were called! I have looked in several tree books and cannot find them. One tree develops this strange ‘fruits’ and changes colour in autumn. The other one has little flowers in the bit tucked inside the stem of the leaf where it joins the trunk and later has this little green fruits. Fascinating!
Homera Wood (via email)
A The first is clearly a yellow-flowered wintersweet, botanically Chimonanthus praecox, which starts blooming in December. The strange little bottle-like growths are seed vessels.
There are two varieties: ‘Grandiflorus’, whose blooms are deeper yellow, with a red-stained throat, and ‘Luteus’, with clear-yellow flowers that don’t open until February and whose blooms do not have a stained centre.
I suggest that when seeds are ripe you mix them with a little damp peat-free compost in a plastic bag and put them in the fridge for six weeks. Then sow them thinly, just covered with perlite. If you consign seeds to a coldframe or somewhere similar, and keep the compost damp, germination should occur within six months.
The other plant is a dogwood (cornus). There are several species and varieties. Some are small bushes, others
