Tuesday 18 June 2013

Black Elder, or Sambuca Nigra "Black Lace"

I was out yesterday, looking for screening ..... for the garden.  We will have our  summerhouse up and ready to use in a few weeks, and its aspect is our garden (lovely!) and neighbour's garage (not so lovely!).  So thinking ahead, I want to plant a few big shrubs or small trees to screen the neighbour out.  I have a few things in mind, and this is the first .... 
Lovely, I think and quite, quite different.  The common elder is green leaved, and plain, not split leaves like this, and a very ordinary green, whereas this is dark dark reddish black - fabulous, and the flower heads are pink, not white.  I bought the biggest I could find (the picture is not mine but at least mine is around 4 ft high already, so I am hoping that within a couple of years it will be up at 10 ft. It will sit on my boundary, where I plan to have a few more trees (silver birches are nice and have catkins at the end of winter) and shrubs.  When we moved here 10 years ago, it was a 100 ft blank canvas.  We had the hedges, and the remains of a border near the house.  Over the years, I have planted, moved, split and done the usual things, and at last it is beginning to be a garden I really like!  And the lovely thing about gardening is that it's like painting a picture - if it doesn't look right you can always change it!

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