In the Garden with Pat Rubin

Bee garden writer Pat Rubin writes about everything that grows, from flowers and trees to vegetables and lawns. Pat volunteered for several years as a Placer County Master Gardener and has written about gardening for many national and regional publications. In addition to gardening, she spends time raising and showing miniature horses and miniature donkeys.

In the Garden will include news, events, advice and other gardening tidbits. Pat will also answer reader questions.

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February 4, 2008

Whenever I see a viburnum in bloom, I want to plant one in the garden. The flowers are perfect balls of tiny white blooms. The stems have a lovely pinkish tinge. The foliage is rich dark green, very tidy, very beautiful. Come fall the plants are covered in blue-black berries. The plant is lovely to see all during the year. The Shasta, or doublefile viburnums, are eceptionally lovely and graceful in their growth habit.

Then I remember the Viburnum compacta I had for many years. While it was beautiful in bloom and had gorgeous foliage, it also reseeded itself all over the garden. At first I thought it was nice to have a sort of mini-forest of viburnum. It’s rich dark green leaves looked spectacular next to the fiery red of Euonymous compacta alata in the fall. Then in mid to late winter the flowers would start to appear, and I’d forget about the viburnum’s thuggish tendencies and let it live another year.

Finally I realized if i didn't do something soon, I'd have nothing but viburnums in the garden. I realized I'd ceased looking at the beauty of the plant, and instead saw it as a seedling-spitting machine determined to cover my whole garden with baby viburnums that would grow up to produce even more viburnums! Actually I had to remove four viburnums growing in close quarters with trunks the size of baseball bats. It was a bit of a chore, and getting the stumps out was even harder. Then there was the forest of tiny seedlings with tough taproots that sprouted after the mother plants had been removed. Then another batch of seeds would sprout. I even discovered a three-foot-tall sprout growing beneath the McNabb cypresses on the other side of the house!

After taking this photograph of a gorgeous viburnum in the Ruth Risdon Storer Garden at the UCD Arboretum, I decided to take another look at viburnums. The Web sites I visited all say viburnum seeds are difficult to germinate and require a long dormancy period.

Was I simply one of the “lucky” few to have so many viburnum seedlings? Do you readers have any experience with viburnums reseeding all over the garden?

Bottom line: look at viburnums again for their year-round beauty, but ask whether they reseed. No one wants to let loose in the world a thug determined to take over the world.

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