Apple Blossom Escallonia
"If you truly love Nature, you will find beauty everywhere."
-Vincent Van Gogh
(1853-1890)
(1853-1890)
Escallonia langleyensis has small round evergreen leaves with rapid growth to five or six feet, or even larger. It can be trained by careful pruning into a compact shrub, but we've let ours go largely unpruned for an intentionally wild appearance.
It has become quite a tangle of stems, yet has for a few years remained compact even without pruning. There is thus far not the least tendency to lankiness; but when heavily flowered & after a rainfall, the tall shrub can droop a bit under the extra weight. I'd long pondered attaching it with garden twine to the wooden fence it is beside, but the lean was never extreme or lasting, so I just let it do as it pleased. But then a heavy snow weighted it down more than ever had happened & it did not pop back up entirely, so I did finally tie it upright. It could just as easily have been pruned back to start anew, though.If it does eventually become rangy or otherwise demand pruning, the best time would autumn after flowers become scarcer, or at winter's end just before it begins new growth. But if the pruning is done a bit earlier, in August, that would be the ideal time to save the pruned limbs, dip them in a rooting hormone, & put them in greenhouse pots of sandy soil, or in the ground under coldframes, resulting in as many new shrubs as anyone's little heart could desire. As this shrub grows rapidly even from starts, it would be a good choice for a hedge.
Though it is often described as a summer bloomer, & indeed is floweriest June & July, ours gets a few scattered mildly aromatic blossoms on it in January which gradually increase in number, & does not entirely quit blooming until autumn.The flowers occur sometimes as solitary blooms, elsetimes in clusters, phasing in & out with a great many blooms then only a few. The flower close-up at the top of the page is from March (2002). The second photo is from May (2003). The third photograph is from July (2002) & the fourth is from June (2003), this last showing it so thickly covered with tiny white blooms that the whole shrub shows signs of being weighted down, this predating the tie-back to the fence.
Escallonias are native of South America, from Columbia to Brazil to Chile. There are several species ranging from small to medium sized shrubs, on up to escallonia trees. They are mostly evergreens. They are named for 18th Century Spanish traveller & plant hunter Antonio Escallon. The species we have, E. langleyensis (Langley's Escallonia), refers to the place in British Columbia where it was first hybridized in 1893, for it is not a true species, but is a cultivated cross of red-blossoming E. rubra with white-blossoming E. virgata.The range of color reflected in these photographs is accurate. The pink buds in summer open to be pure white, as would be the flowers of E. virgata. But as seen in the first & second photos, the blossoms in autumn, winter, & spring, though fewer, are slightly larger, with much richer rosey hues, revealing its relationship to E. rubra. I can only guess that the difference in color is temperature-related, pink in cool weather, white in warm weather. Or, white summer flowers wear out sooner in the heat, whereas the long-lasting flowers of the chilly-season increase in depth of color as they age.
'Apple Blossom' is this hybrid's best-known of many cultivars. It is usually described as pale pink, so our seasonal color changes for it may not be true of all specimens. There are other varieties with blooms that are more definitively peach colored, or white, or red, & some cultivars have each blossom twice the size as for 'Apple Blossom.' The most popular pink variety is E. x exoniensis 'Fradesii' also known as 'Pink Princess.' They all have that look of something traditional our grandmothers would've grown, because they are in fact shrubs our grandmothers might have had.
It likes a lot of sun. It is tolerant of a wide range of conditions just so long as it isn't terribly alkaline, too wet, or too shaded. It is drought-hardy when established, but much flowerier with regular watering in well-drained soil, fertilized at the very least in early spring. Escallonia can even stand up to salt spray in coastal gardens. They are not fond of hot climates, however, preferring temperate zones.