Beware of plants that use suckers – shoots springing up from the roots – as well as seeds to spread. We all enjoy shrubs that produce cheering spring flowers with the bonus of fine autumn colour. Think how fragrant lilacs burst on the scene in spring or how chokeberry’s white spring flowers and early splash of red autumn leaves delight us. And, however much we like Rhus typhina, it’s another shrub that will dominate the garden all too quickly by throwing out suckers.
Unfortunately hamamelis, witch hazel, is a prime offender when it comes to suckers. With Halloween looming, it’s worth noting that this witch is quite unconnected with that festival’s wizened old hags, coming instead from the Anglo-Saxon "wice", meaning pliable or bending, just like the tree’s young twigs and branches. While the leaves are very like those of hazel, the genera are quite unrelated.
Witch hazels all flower for a long time, between four and six weeks, the distinctive, spidery flowers often exuding a fine, almost spicy fragrance. Most cultivars, like the rarely grown Hamamelis intermedia Ostergold, have differing shades of yellow flowers. Ostergold's leaves are just as attractive, turning from maroon to green and then a striking yellow in autumn. With its dense clusters of fragrant, coppery flowers, Hamamelis x intermedia Jelena is another winner.
However appealing, many of our favourite plants have a downside. Hamamelis uses suckering as a means of reproduction, stems sprouting from shallow roots. This suckering is as irritating as it is damaging, sucking nutrients and moisture from the roots and thereby weakening it as it denies the mother plant this nourishment. When this unwelcome growth springs up underneath the canopy, it can result in a congested mass of crossing branches which can rub against each other and allow cankers and other diseases into the shrub or tree.
To make matter worse, a sucker can sometimes become larger and more dominant than its mother. This often happens when an attractive but less robust variety is grafted on to a vigorous rootstock. Any suckers will come from the rootstock, not the choice cultivar. Our witch hazel cultivars are often grafted on to the vigorous North American rootstock, Hamamelis virginiana, and this applies to the Japanese witch hazel, H japonica, the Chinese, H mollis, and the Japanese-Chinese cross H x intermedia.
Suckers can appear an astonishing distance from the mother tree. I’ve been battling with a supposedly dead aspen for years as it still throws up new shoots 20 or 30 metres from the decaying trunk, so I’m furiously cutting out suckers emerging in my polytunnel. With witch hazels, this is a good time to identify suckers that are very close to their mother. For example, the leaves of a H mollis cultivar should ordinarily be broadly oval, mid green. If, as is frequently the case, a cultivar has been grafted on to H virginiana, the leaves from that vigorous rootstock will be smaller, have uneven margins and be paler green.
The common advice is to break suckers roughly at or just below ground level rather than cut them cleanly. If neatly cut with secateurs or loppers, the sucker will probably produce several small, new stems. Unless you’re hawk-eyed, however, any sucker growth in your garden may have become too tough to rip off. In such cases, scrape away the soil around the sucker and cut the sucker fairly close to the root. You then roughen the end of the sucker by cutting into it a few times with secateurs.
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