My Mahonia

Every winter I am on the Oregon trail for garden scent. My best hope is the Mahonia (aka Oregon grape) which grows very well in various shady parts of my garden and flowers profusely in winter. Regrettably I find the much acclaimed scent is hard to detect but smell is not the only thing that gets up my nose! The rigid leaves have several vicious points on  the arrayed leaves and catch me out many times a year. This is partly due to a 6 foot shrub near my Japanese garden path. I don’t know what made me think Mahonia was suitable in a Japanese garden but there you go. As a deterrent to uninvited visitors the prickles make it as good as Holly and a close second to Berberis.

On my public-radio show, Arboretum director Mark Weathington took me through the years-long process of “discovering” new plants. Plus, Mark highlighted some Arboretum specialties that may belong in your garden, including standout redbuds and mahonias, and the lesser-known evergreen shrub Illicium, and even showy native dogwoods selected to withstand increasingly saline soils in tricky coastal areas.What’s now called the J.C. Raulston Arboretum at North Carolina State University is where I met my first Cephalotaxus–a near-lookalike to our common evergreen yews but excitingly deer-resistant. And then a moment later I met another one–this time a columnar form–an

 When I first came across Mahonia Soft Caress I knew I just had to have it. I mean, look at it, completely different from any Mahonia you have ever seen. But then I thought, Is Mahonia Soft Caress Hardy.

Mahonia Soft Caress is a fairly new plant that is so very different from its prickly, upright and at times rather ungainly relatives. It’s delicate foliage fills a gap between a grass and a fern and surprisingly (but very effectively) it is used by Dan Pearson in his Chatsworth inspired garden at Chelsea. I had been wonder

Mahonias don’t get a particularly good press, mainly because they are too often left to grow straggly – which is not a good look. Bare stems, sparse leaves and a top knot of flowers doesn’t show this plant off to its best advantage, however sweet the perfume of its winter flowers. Later in the ye