Rhododendrons ~ Mad, Bad & Dangerous To Know.
It’s rhododendron season and they have flooded every garden centre, supermarket and DIY outlet in the country. Drive around any town in England and there they are, squatting in every front garden like a loud and proud parade of pantomime dames at a street party. They might be here, but are they in or are they out?
I’ve never liked them. We used to have one in the corner of the garden in my childhood home where we’d bury our dead cats. It never really grew, nor produced many flowers, then, when it did, it was a brief and meagre reward with weeks of dried-up brown flower clumps just sitting there reminding you of the transient brevity of beauty and the permanent eternity of gruesome death. I don’t blame it really, it was a joyless place to grow.
Dead rhododendron - the eternity of lost youth.
As I grew up and it became my job to research changing horticultural tastes and predict future gardening trends, my instincts towards Rhododendrons remained constant and as the decades notched up, their reputation for vulgarity intensified as the 70s clarified in the past. In fact, the more I learned, the vulgarer they got. Ripped up from their native mountain tops in Asia and transplanted by the marauding nouveaux riche Grand Tourists, they flooded the margins of Country House Garden hedges, and represented the deeply rooted Victorian fashion for garish decadence.
If rhododendrons were a man, they’d be Byron.
Oh Lordy Miss Gaudy - A riot of yellow, orange & pink azaleas & rhododendrons.
Evergreen shrubs native to Spain, Portugal, Turkey, North America and Nepal, bees who feast solely on rhododendron flowers produce what every randy, hallucinogenic-thrill-seeking trust-fund yoot craves - MAD HONEY. Believed to enhance sexual prowess and known to contain psychoactive properties, one teaspoon full will knock you across the far side of the flowerbeds, any more and you may never find your way home again, bit like Byron.
Too much Mad Honey Making - he recovered.
Not that I needed further validation my instincts were right, but I might have emitted an audible “I knew it!” when I found out their symbolic meaning is “danger” and “flee” - look what happened to Rebecca, and there is some ironic moral justice in that the Victorians who invaded Asia, and pilfered everything they saw, brought back a plant that was harder to handle than them.
Red Rhododendron spell danger.
‘Inappropriate plant pillaging’ might be the polite current term but it was extremely irresponsible planting well deserving of an ASBO. As they subsequently squandered the money they plundered during their empire building, or lost their Estates in the war, the rhododendrons they established in riverbanks and woodlands were abandoned and as a result allowed to invaded the natural landscape of the countryside and colonised our own native plantlife and streams. Fair nuff on a human level, but rough justice for the native wildlife that paid the greatest price.
Left with a lifelong rhododendron association to personal sadness and combined with their symbolic representation of global destruction by careless Victorians, I harboured a distaste for their gaudy flamboyance, (extremely out of character for me), and condemned them to be eternally out of fashion and favour.
Until this little fella turned it all around. He was one of a group of tiny plants I bought from B&M when the Victorian terrace house I was renovating and living in at the same time was still deep in filth, rubble and eternal darkness. I bought them as an antidote to all the chemicals and paint I was dragging home in the freezing rain and hoped they’d bring some life and charm to the joint.
Rhododendron Sapling - three bricks high.
I’m ashamed to say I was not exactly the kindest foster mother to the little rhody, I was still harbouring some resentment towards them and would accidentally break branches off it through carelessness, starve it through neglect and generally be a bit of a rotten rhody mother. Gawd love it, it just sat there, trying to please. I wasn’t impressed and was convinced it was never going to flower, and only through boredom I finally repotted it earlier this Spring into some ericaceous compost, not totally out of generosity but also just to empty the bag I had sitting around and in the way.
Three weeks later I am delighted to announce I am the proud parent of a great big fat flower bud which quickly transformed itself into a mother-of-the-groom’s hat at a wedding in 1974. If it were a dress it’d be a crimpelene kaftan. If it were a cake, it’d be a defrosted Black Forest Gateaux. If rhododendrons were a band they’d be the Rolling Stones; loud, flash, crass and all over you like a rash.
Hello there little big bud.
She’s about to blow!
Poof!! My Rhododendron - off to a wedding.
The moral of the story is, if you are going to plant a rhododendron, choose wisely, or you might end up with a creeping Bill Wyman lurking in murk in the bottom of your garden.
