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Flowering shrubs are among plants that are peaking
By Jim Chatfield
Special to the Beacon Journal
Published on Saturday, Oct 06, 2007
Wonderful weather continues drawing Hiking Spree trekkers to Metro Parks, Serving Summit County, trails, gardeners continue their frost-free harvests, and fall foliage features are slow to emerge.
Many landscape plants are at their peak, from the cheery starlike flowers of blue, white and purple asters to a range of fruiting and flowering shrubs, including smooth witherod viburnum and seven-sun flower.
Now for our Almanac Q&A for the week.
Q: What in heaven's name is smooth witherod viburnum?
A: Admittedly that is a rhetorical question. The question walkers at the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center's Secrest Arboretum more commonly ask is: What is that heavenly plant?
The smooth witherod viburnum that is a current craze for plant lovers is Viburnum nudum Winterthur. What the fuss is all about is the combination of lustrous reddish to purple leaves paired with flat-topped clusters of pink drupes that change to blue. This combination of pink, blue and glossy red is truly spectacular. This small to medium native shrub (5-10 feet) will definitely be added to my Chatscape in the future.
Q: What is seven-son flower?
A: This is a medium to large Asian shrub that may grow into a small tree. It is just finishing its season of attractive panicles of starry-white blooms. Do not despair, for now the inflorescences take on their best characteristic.
The sepals (the floral whorl beneath the white petals) persist for several months and are maturing into a very attractive salmon pink. En masse, this is perhaps the most ornamental feature of this shrub, providing an unusual fall color to go with the dark green leaves and exfoliating bark features of this shrub.
And why seven sons? The flowers are architecturally arrayed in candelabra-like whorls of six flowers terminated by a single (seventh) flower.
Q: What are those weird white things shimmying about on the beech branches?
A: I get this question frequently while strolling the boardwalk at Johnson Woods Nature Preserve near Orrville. The boogie-woogie-ing insects are beech blight aphids.
The term ''blight'' sounds pretty ominous, especially for those who have heard of a serious beech tree problem, beech bark disease, which is causing devastation in many native beech stands, especially further east.
Beech bark disease involves the Nectria fungus and an insect but a scale insect, not aphids. Fortunately, the beech blight aphids at Johnson Woods and other beech woods are relatively harmless, albeit with a series of curious and strange features.
These aphids become quite noticeable in late summer and early fall.
Look for a mass of white fluffy powdery insects, which, if you approach, all begin waving about in synchrony, the better to scare you and more serious predators away. It is quite fascinating to watch.
The aphids are sucking sap from the plant and then excreting it. This sweet reprocessed sap (politely called ''honeydew'' but really aphid excrement) then falls to the leaves below and becomes colonized by a sooty grayish fungal mold.
In some cases a tawny fungal mold also colonizes the aphid honeydew.
To further complete the picture, the molds often blacken with age.
Puddles of graying sooty mold on the Johnson Woods boardwalk, the occasional mat of tawny soot mold that accumulates in branch crotches, especially when funneled into a leaf stuck in the branch angle, old encrustations of blackened sooty mold it's quite a scene.
Even more confusing is when the sooty mold develops on maple and other leaves rather than beech, not because these plants are hosts to the beech blight aphid, but just because honeydew fell from beeches above and then sooty mold colonized the honeydew.
Fortunately, none of the plants, including the beeches, suffers significant damage.
All told, this creates a puzzling picture to hikers, except now you, as informed Almanac readers.
Q: What is a royal paulownia tree?
A: This unusual Chinese native (Paulownia tomentosa), also called an emperor tree or princess tree, is considered almost an invasive pest in some Appalachian areas, but is relatively uncommon in Northeast Ohio.
It has a number of dramatic features, including large panicles of purple and yellow foxglove-like flowers in spring, beaklike panicles of fruits with multitudes of seeds, and large heart-shaped leaves (often young seedlings have monster-size leaves two feet wide and larger).
A feature that I had not paid much attention to until last week was the very attractive combination of soft, downy flower buds that are evident now along with the beak-shaped fruits and the five starlike remnants of fruit receptacles where fruit has fallen away. Together, these were quite attractive.
Paulownias, believe it or not, are in the Scrophulariaceae or snapdragon family, as evidenced by their flowers, and presumably were spread throughout the mountains early in our republic, by Johnny Paulownia?
Jim Chatfield is a horticultural educator with Ohio State University Extension. If you have questions about caring for your garden, write: Plant Lovers' Almanac, Akron Beacon Journal, P.O. Box 640, Akron, OH 44309-0640. Include your phone number.
Wonderful weather continues drawing Hiking Spree trekkers to Metro Parks, Serving Summit County, trails, gardeners continue their frost-free harvests, and fall foliage features are slow to emerge.
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