Rhododendrons and Azaleas

Having acid soil, the ericaceous loving Rhododendrons and Azaleas do really well in our garden. We have two Rhododendrons, a white one and a purple one, plus a bright orange Azalea.

The White One

The white Rhododendron is the first to come into flower. Unfortunately I don’t know the name of it as it was already here when we came in 2013. Poor thing was surrounded by weeds, mainly the dreaded ground elder.

In 2014 as we cleared the garden out to make way for ‘The Great Wall’ and a complete re-design, we dug it up with a substantial root ball, trying to avoid the weeds! It was moved to its second home by the large, golden Irish yew tree – ‘Taxus Baccata Fastigiata Aurea’.

We knew we’d keeping the yew and it’s grown substantially in the intervening years. Helped by us setting it free when we first arrived. We thought something seemed strange and when we looked inside it, there were ropes tying the branches together. This type of yew is naturally conical so certainly didn’t need that.

Back to the white Rhodo. I went ahead with my plan to have a white garden area, and once it was complete in 2016 an even larger rootball was dug for the now much bigger Rhododendron. It was loaded onto our trusty trolley and moved to its third and final home.

It’s gone from strength to strength, covered in blooms from the end of April, well into May. The buds are white, with a slight pink flush to them, but the large white flowers are pure white.

The Orange One

The orange Azalea is next to come into flower, this year opening its first bloom on the 5th May.

When I started to research shrubs for the woodland border, I knew I wanted bright, definite colours, I’m not really a pastel sort of person, although a few are allowed.

When I first saw the picture of this bright orange azalea, it immediately caught my eye, but when I saw its name ‘Gibraltar’ I knew it was the one for me.

My late father (a very keen gardener) had been posted to Gibraltar for a time during WW2 and he never stopped talking about Gibraltar, and how kind the people were to them.

For the first couple of years, despite being smaller it flowered really well, but in subsequent years it has had less and less blooms on. I finally read up about it, and discovered the problem is usually related to lack of water. As our garden is basically on top of a sand and gravel deposit, its an understatement to say that its free draining!

Last year I made more effort to water, it especially as we had a heatwave summer. Luckily we had a huge amount of rain late autumn into early winter and I think the results speak for themselves.

It’s been fabulous!

The Purple One

Third, but by no means least, the purple one.

I desperately wanted a purple rhododendron and found a really dark one online. I went along to my local, family run nursery as they had it on their list. When I asked about it she told me they’d had to stop selling it as it wasn’t performing well.

I was disappointed but she said they had slightly lighter one that was a much stronger, healthier variety, ‘Fastuosum Flora Pleno’. She wasn’t wrong, it’s been covered in blooms every year and always looks healthy, even in the heatwave.

It’s such a good value plant, with glossy evergreen leaves all year. The buds form really early but then start to swell up in April. By early May you can see the colour in the buds and a few days before it finally blooms they are so colourful that it look from a distance that it’s already in flower.

We had visitors on Sunday 7th May and they were admiring it, but not one flower was open. I said, you are one day off seeing the full show, I’m sure it will be out tomorrow, and it was!

We have now had three weeks of colour and it is now more of a mauve colour as it fades away for another year.

But gardening never stands still and the summer perennials are growing up around it, waiting to take over the colour mantel.