One of the most common flowering shrubs in our corner of Connecticut is Kolkwitzia. Never heard of it? Well, back in the early 1800s this attractive shrub was given its name by a professor of botany in Berlin, Dr. Kolkwitz. Few gardeners in our country even knew what this shrub looked like, but then some clever nurseryman gave it the common name of Beauty Bush and it became wildly popular.
The beauty bush really is quite beautiful, producing a fountain of sweet-smelling pink blossoms in late spring. It originated in China and grows as high as ten feet, its branches arching and loaded with flower clusters each June. The blooms are bell-shaped and open into five petals. As the bush ages, its smooth gray bark splits vertically and then peels. It has no known pests or diseases.
When we bought our farm in the winter of 1962, I had no idea that we had a beauty bush growing on the east side of the house. Having moved to East Canaan from Fairfield County, I was unfamiliar with either Kolkwitzia or beauty bushes. Fairfield seems to have almost no flowering shrubs except dogwoods. I was thrilled when the specimen beside the front porch burst into blossom that first spring, filling the air with such sweet perfume.
The beauty bush keeps its handsome shape without pruning. You can cut the tips of the branches to get more blossoms, but it's not really necessary. Unfortunately our bush grew so large that it completely blocked the view from the east window of the playroom, eliminating warm winter sunlight. About ten years ago Hank gave it a ruthless haircut, pruning it down to an ugly bush, scrubby and shapeless. Each year it tried to send out graceful new branches and new blossoms, but the minute it began to look handsome again, Hank would get out the snickersnee and give it another haircut.
The bush, pictured above, still sent out its lucious perfume each spring, but thanks to Hank's haircuts, really stopped being very attractive. When I realized that the barber would never allow it to resume its graceful shape, I decided there was no point in even having it. I told Hank he could cut the poor shrub down to the ground and we would plant a new one where it would not block the window. What remained of the original bush was a gnarled and crooked circle of stumps a little bigger than an inner tube.
Hank poisoned the stumps, which sat up too high to be mowed over, and there they sat. What an eyesore. Hank didn't seem to notice and when I suggested we dig down around them and attack them with a chainsaw, he pooh-poohed the idea, claiming that in a year or two they'd rot away. Of course they were still there two years later, as strong and sturdy as ever.
Ah, but then Hank went off to his boat. A few days later I got out the shovel, the pry bar, the chainsaw, the snickersnee and a trowel. As it turned out, those stumps weren't as sturdy as they looked. Some actually came out of the ground with a good hard tug. Others I lopped off with the snickersnee. The last one was fat and tough and resisted all my efforts to remove it, so, reluctantly, I got out the chainsaw. I'm not happy handling the chainsaw, but at least it's an electric one so it starts easily. I sawed off the remaining stump well below the ground, and by the end of the afternoon I had a nice big hole.
I filled four buckets with compost and dumped them in the hole, but as I began smoothing the area my rake hit a huge rock that turned out to be a buried flagstone. As I poked further I found another and then another, and suddenly remembered how we'd laid them there. When we moved to Locust Hill the farmhouse had a large glassed-in porch that faced south. We preferred to have the winter sun reach the interior rooms, so we had a "wrecking party," inviting friends to come with hammers, pry bars and picnics to disassemble the porch. We removed all the windows, then Hank sawed through the length of both the porch roof and its floor with a skill saw, cutting them in half. Everyone helped to pull apart the shambles that fell to the ground and light poured into the house.
Soon after that party we replaced the remains of the wooden floor with flagstones we'd uncovered in a field, and added five more just beyond the porch. Over the years they'd disappeared under the dirt. Once I'd pried them up and leveled them, I planted wooly thyme between their cracks. Then I seeded the area where the beauty bush had been, covered it with hay, watered it, and laid some old pieces of fencing on it so the dogs wouldn't dig there.
What a marvelous landscaping project that was. When I was all through I stood back and looked at the whole area, and to my delight, saw that the new beauty bush, even as small as it was, had produced its first pink blossoms.
