Like most gardeners, I have a nose for a bargain, so a gorgeous-looking plant that also produces fruit scores double points.
I love the delicate flowers of prunus, although I'm not so keen on the blowsier, pink varieties I sometimes see in other gardens. The smaller, more delicate spring blossom hits the spot for me.
Like most gardeners, I also have a nose for a bargain, so a gorgeous-looking plant that also produces fruit scores double points.
Prunus spinosa is commonly known as blackthorn, and produces wonderful sloe berries in autumn that I use to make my sloe gin. I've still got a little left, but have made a mental note not to make any next year.
The plants have been looking stunning for a few weeks, the flowers so densely packed along the leaf-free stems that they clothe them almost entirely in white blossom. It may be sold in garden centres and nurseries as a native hedging plant, but surely its time more were grown as ornamentals (with a sideline in winter liqueur production, of course).
The only problem is that they self-seed and tend to spread themselves rather rapidly, but if they do grow too much, or too quickly, you can just cut them back.
