Weeping Apricot

When the garden was new, one of the first plants I put in was a weeping apricot (Prunus mume pendula). It sits in the middle of its own triangular bed and is virtually the first thing you see as you come in the driveway. I chose this tree because I had warm memories of a matching pair of weeping apricots on either side of a flight of steps at Burnley Horticultural College when I was a student there in the early 1980's. This tree is such good value! It starts flowering for me during the first week of June every year and the pale pink blossoms keep appearing until almost September. Its not like a flowering cherry or crabapple where all its blossoms come out at once, last a few weeks and then 'pffff' they're gone in a puff of wind. The flowering apricot continues to produce new blooms from the centre of the tree outwards and then down the long weeping wands. I prune the tree hard as the last blossom falls off and before the first leaf bud opens. This briefly transforms the tree from a weeper into a mop-top until growth gets going and the weeping branches start to grow again. In this way the tree never gets too big and always has plenty of current growth on which to produce hundreds of flowers. The tree also rewards me with a great autumn show when the leaves turn shades of butter yellow and glowing orange. And unlike the flowering cherry the apricot never gets pear and cherry slug which can defoliate a cherry almost overnight. The triangle bed is beside the driveway so this tree has always received plenty of run-off as the water puddles beside the bed. I can't recommend this tree highly enough! It should be more widely planted.

Recently I pulled out the dogs breakfast of plants beneath the apricot and decided to replace them with a monoculture figuring that would show off the tree better. I took heaps of cuttings of my Erigeron 'Elsie' a great little pink flowering erigeron that is very drought tolerant. I simply spread the bed with organic compost and stuck the cuttings in after first dipping their bases in a rooting gel. Fingers crossed it works! After two weeks the cuttings still look okay. The idea is as the last apricot flower finishes in September, the first erigeron flower will appear.