GARDENS and countryside take on a gentle green sheen as the leaves on trees, shrubs and hedgerows unfurl. It is especially pleasing to observe beech where the whole tree provides a shimmering haze of wine red while the buds swell and enlarge before the leaves burst from the chrysalis. Already willows, sycamores and chestnuts lead the way and we have a while to await the lethargic ash and oak trees. Meantime many a pleasure calls our attention, some more welcome than others.
Am I alone in spurning the company of the orange flowered berberis - there are several of them, one less enticing than another? Yes, berberis can make a fine, thorny thicket of a hedge which will readily block intruders, but it could not be described as beautiful. I experimented with such a hedge once, and having waited a few years to get it established I could not abide it and was much relieved when we parted. I stayed and the hedge went. Holly would make a nicer and better thorny hedge any time.
Now I see the brazen berberis in profusion in gardens and on road side as well as outside public loos gesturing offensively. Often it keeps company with those dangerous thugs the forsythia and flowering currant. Quite a pick they make. How much nicer it would be to see roadsides and public places occupied by our native Ulex europaeous, better known depending on your location - as whin, furze or gorse. Its bright cheering yellow is especially welcome and so much better than the mad tones of the orange berberis.
Some others of the berberis tribe are useful and pleasant enough company. Berberis julianae is not often seen but for a well armed vicious customer it takes some beating. The barbs are especially long and menacing, the flowers a good clean yellow in late spring and early summer and well set off by the glossy evergreen foliage. Altogether it is one of the better members of the family. The red leaved Berberis thunbergii is useful too and can be a good foliage plant as well as providing a useful hedge. It will not go much above five or six feet in height.
Better still is the dwarf form Berberis thunbergii Atropurpurea Nana. The foliage here is a good, rich reddish purple and gives a useful dark patch at the front of a border, contrasting or blending well with yellows for a stronger picture. Hedges of this plant, which can be kept at a foot or so high and wide, can be used as contrast with box in formal arrangements. It is deciduous, but excellent value nevertheless.
THE real aristocrats of the family - berberis really does straddle the social spectrum - are more difficult to come by. Aristocrats always are, but unless you know about them you cannot seek them out. Some of the books do not even mention them and that is not because there could ever be any doubt about their worth.
The first, Berberis dictophylla, is nicely armed with spines on thin branches which at first are furnished with a white bloom. The leaves are a bluish green above and covered with a white bloom below. The flowers, a pale yellow, are modest but this superior shrub is desirable for its very telling foliage. Eventually it reaches to six feet and the stems arch out, sending up numerous side shoots, making it as wide as it is high. It comes from western China and was introduced 80 years ago, so it ought to be a little better known than as the case.
Considered to be better still is Berberis temolaica from Tibet. This provides duckegg blue foliage - the blue green of the leaf combining with a white bloom to create a magical effect. A foliage shrub par excellence, it can get a little bigger going up to eight feet. I sometimes think the habit a bit gawky, but such doubts are only fleeting, such is the beauty of the foliage. T.he flowers are pale yellow - a million miles from the louts on the roadside.