Years ago my mother planted a calycanthus occidentalis in my front garden.
Only this season did it put out flowers – strangely scented lotus-like burgundy things .
(Charles Webber © California Academy of Sciences)
[Click picture for a bigger image.]
They run up and down its long thin branches.
When I scrape its bark, my fingers smell of cinnamon.
It wasn’t until I asked my neighbor, Barbara Shidler, to come over and tell me what it was that I could identify the calycanthus. I’d tried Google Images and gotten nowhere.
It’s so beautiful, it suits so well my dark house and garden, that I want to move it forward. (“Move your mahonia and put the calycanthus there,” said Lizzie, another neighbor who happened by. “Get rid of the mahonia. Stick it in the back.”)
It’s positively hallucinogenic.
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Okay, so that was rather difficult. Not the digging up part and the transplanting part. It’s been raining; the soil is soft. The tree is still thin and delicate.
But the bush just adjacent to the newly placed Spicebush has a cardinal nest with three eggs and an hysterical mother. [Scroll down for eggs, nest.] As I dug a hole for the calycanthus, I told off the bird for putting her nest steps from my front door.
I went to a great deal of trouble not to disturb the nest with my digging and watering. The mother bird flew off as I worked and watched me like a hawk from my roof. She didn’t stop chip-chip-chip-chip-chipping until I left.
May 5th, 2011 at 9:01PM
Doesn’t that have a wonderful smell? It’s like bubblegum to me. I’ve never heard of it referred to as “spicebush” — usually that’s Lindera benzoin, not Calycanthus.