At Christmas my wife gave me a spicebush plant in a one-gallon nursery container (botanists call it Calycanthus occidentalis). Somehow I had missed a living plant under the Christmas tree — it had only been wrapped enough to obscure the black plastic pot — so it was a real surprise and delight when I unwrapped it.
Spicebush, the books tell us, is a deciduous woodland/riparian shrub to eight feet tall, native to central California, fast-growing, and spreading by rhizomes. Its scented foliage is redolent of aged wine barrels.
In other words, a good screen plant for a spot next to an irrigated vegetable garden. And pretty darn local; we’re just barely south enough here to be considered “southern” California, so a central-California plant is fairly appropriate.
It also doesn’t hurt that our dog tends to do her dirty work in the spot I had in mind; I was hoping that the shrub’s aroma would somewhat obscure the unsavory evidence.
But there’s one key word in the description that I hadn’t attended to as closely as I might have: deciduous.
When the plant came out from under the Christmas tree, it was looking pretty wan. Most of the leaves were pale yellow and half-decayed. And there weren’t many leaves to begin with. Apparently the gentleman at the nursery had been confident that the plant was perfectly healthy, though.
So I put it in the ground a few days later, and after a couple of rains and an encounter or two with the dog, it had gone from wan to barren:
No problem, I thought: It’s deciduous, right? Loses its leaves in the winter and all that. It’s doing what it’s supposed to do. The thing about ‘deciduous’ is that you just don’t see much of it around here, in this evergreen land of live oak groves and citrus ranches.
Then winter started winding down. The handful of deciduous trees in the neighborhood started growing leaves again, and blossoming. The weather grew warmer. Birdsong was a normal part of the day again. And still, the spicebush looked like this:
So I started wondering if the plant just hadn’t made it. Maybe one too many run-ins with the dog. Maybe the, um, richness that the dog’s work had imparted to the surrounding soil had been too much for it. I’m always hearing that California natives don’t like fertilizer…
Since spicebush is a shrub, it has woody stems. And, at least for me, it’s pretty hard to tell the difference between dead woody stems and live ones. So I had no way of knowing whether this thing was alive. I finally decided that, if it hadn’t shown obvious new growth by the end of April, I would leave it for dead.
And then today I was doing my usual rounds in the backyard, and noticed these:
What a relief. And how exciting to think that in a few months there’s going to be a sizeable Calycanthus occidentalis in that spot.
