Usually, shrubs for the home grounds are chosen for beauty, fitness, diversified attractions, or mere serviceability.
But the Korean spice viburnum appeals more directly to our affections titan to our aesthetic or practical sense.
It has little beauty of foliage and no decorative fruit or prominent autumn color.
It just holds out, early in May, 2-inch button-heads of pinkish florets resembling those of Daphne cneorum.
Fragrance In Garden
With much the same fragrance, only more of it and more freely wafted about the house and into open doors and windows.
Not the heavy sweetness of magnolia or honeysuckle, but bracing, clear and spicy. There is no finer perfume in the garden, ever.
Once you know it, you look forward to it each year as a sort of spiritual experience in early May.
It is a native of the Korean countryside near Seoul. And it blooms on Mothers’ Day in lower New York State.
With these associations and this fragrance, does it not seem destined for a cherished place in our gardens?
Two Dissimilar Types
To our confusion, the name Viburnum carlesi comprises two rather dissimilar types today.
The choicer of the two represents a “clonal” form, by which the species was first introduced into Western gardens. This form does not reproduce itself true from seeds.
Viburnum Carlesi
The other type represents seedling progenies of this original don. The choice don makes a bush not over 6′ feet high, wider than high, of spreading, not at all dense habit.
The leaves are broadly oval to elliptic, dull- to grayish green, roughish, hairy, 2″ to 3″ inches long, with blunt to pointed tips, rounded or somewhat heart-lobed at the base; often reddish from late summer on.
It bears large “heads” of wide-flared, somewhat short-tubed florets. Some of them are often sterile. This is the V. carlesi of Reader’s “Manual.”
The seedling progenies form erect, dense shrubs, higher than wide, often over 10′ feet high, with smaller average-sized leaves.
Range of Stamen Characters
Their flower clusters and individual florets vary in size and are mostly less effective than those of the don, but sometimes are as good or better.
They also vary as to floral details, such as the relative length of filaments and anthers and the point at which the stamens are attached to the tube.
The range of their stamen characters includes those of the original Caries specimen and those ascribed by Rehder to V. bitchiuense and his V. juddi. Still, they rarely, if ever, match those of the original don.
Original Carlesi Introduction
V. carlesi was first described and named in England in 1888 by Hemsley, from collections in western Korea by Caries found by Perry. Carles’ specimen bed flowers, Perry’s immature fruit.
In 1907, Hemsley redescribed V. carlesi with a colored plate in the Botanical Magazine – but this time from a plant received at Kew in 1902 from L. Boehmer & Co. of Yokohama, grown from Korean seed which came to that firm in 1885 (or 1897).
This colored plate represents the original carlesi introduction into Europe. The Rochester (N.Y.) parks obtained it from Kew. And, in turn, sent it to the Arnold Arboretum.
New Species From Japan
Meanwhile, in 1902, a Japanese botanist, Makino, who did not know of Hemsley’s V. carlesi, described what seemed to him to be a new species, V. bitchiuense, from a specimen collected in Japan.
The foliage and fruit of this specimen do not differ from that of V. carlesi, but it had no flowers. Nor do the flowers of this wild Japanese plant seem to have been described at a later time.
The popularity of the original Carlesi don in England resulted in a flood of orders for it. Japanese growers, unable to fill them with vegetative propagations, began to raise and ship seedlings.
These were suspected in England to belong to a different species; and E. H. Wilson, then in Japan, was asked to investigate.
He came up with the answer that they were V. bitchiuense. And so this name came to stick for what is nothing but a range of seedlings such as anyone who cares to may raise from seeds of the original Carlesi don.
It is undoubtedly from this range of seedlings that descriptions of the flowers of V. bitchinense in handbooks are derived.
The Original Carlesi Don Seedlings
When seedlings of the original Carlesi don came to be raised at the Arnold Arboretum, their floral characters were found to run between those of the don and the supposed V. bitchiuense.
These intermediates were believed to be of a hybrid nature, and one of them, of better than average floral quality, was named a hybrid V. juddi.
The plant is not a hybrid but simply a clon selected from among V. carlesi seedlings. It might well be called V. carlesi var. juddi. The original Carlesi don, too, should be given a distinct variety name.
Confusions of this kind make it difficult for people to obtain the plants they want by name.
All the Carlesi forms are good things. The seedlings are fine, tall shrubs. The original don is better for more use as a dooryard bush.
All thrive in any reasonably good soil. The clon succeeds well in light overhead shade.
44659 by P Melle