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Mae West said that "Too much of as good thing can be wonderful" and I feel sure that she was referring to evergreen azaleas. They are wonderful but it could also be argued
that they can be too much. Certainly there are too many. Given the wealth of cultivars available the overwhelmed gardener reels in the pink excesses of May.
The only practical refuge is to develop favourites. It might be possible to plant one of everything in a floral frenzy but every new addition to the garden would edge out
a portion of sanity until there was nothing left but wide eyed wonder. In any incomprehensibly complex group of plants my favourites are those that can be identified reliably. They become familiar and there is nothging like familiarity to engender fondness. I think I may have inadvertently returned to Mae West. No matter. 'Kirin' , with its salmon-pink hose-in-hose flowers, is easily identified and therefore a simple source of secure delight. My plants have been lifted repeatedly and moved around the garden. They don't seem to mind though they are getting a bit large now. The description in the International Rhododendron Register says: "Evergreen azalea, parentage unknown. Japan (pre 1918). Fls single, hose-in-hose, tubular funnel-shaped, 30 x 20-25mm, rose red (variously recorded as 24/2, 623/1 or 54C) with a darker blotch, shading to silvery rose. Award of Merit 1952. Wilson no.22. Kurume." John Good wrote in an AGS blog: "I am not generally a ‘fan’ of double flowers, but there are exceptions, and this is one of them. The double, pale-pink, so-called hose-in-hose flowers, reliably cover the evergreen bush in late April. It thrives in full sun or partial shade, but flowers more profusely in the open. This selection is more than a century old in cultivation. It is one of the best 50 evergreen azaleas selected by the famous plant collector, Ernest Wilson, in Japan, known as ‘Wilson’s 50’. He introduced it to cultivation with the others, in 1918, when they took the horticultural world by storm." |
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| 11th May 2008 | ||
