I have a young Styrax Japonica - the picture of health, this is it's third year since I purchased it in a 1 gal. container - it looks fine in every way - but NO BLOSSOMS! What am I doing wrong? (It is now about 10 ft. tall.)
stubborn styrax Thanks for the reply - it made me laugh out loud! But it doesn't solve the problem - should I buy it a manual on "the facts of life" or "asexual reproduction"? oh, well - maybe next year!
Love Justice's figure of speech! Ours barely bloomed last year, this year it was profuse. The reason I have many plants - every year, some plant will not do what you want it to do. Its not a problem - its a fact. So have enough so one covers for another. Have you seen Styrax japonica 'Pink Chimes'?
Pink chimes is a great variety, we have a couple at the nursery, nice 1 1/2" caliper size, always draws a crowd at bloom time. The other variety we carry that is nice in its own right is Styrax obassia, aka fragrant snowbell, larger, rounded leaf with slightly larger flowers and enhanced fragrance to the japonica.
This street tree in the Kitsilano section of Vancouver caught my eye today - I think it must be Styrax japonicus 'Pink Chimes'.
Now I learn that there's Styrax roseus, collected by Ernest "Chinese" Wilson (on our England tour, we saw a garden created in his honour in Chipping Campden, where he was born), so I have no idea which this is. 'Pink Chimes' is supposed to have pendent branches on young trees (according to an online excerpt from Hillier Manual of Trees). I was told by someone who posts a lot of photos of local flora on flickr that this is known as S. roseus here.
Well, actually what I said is that Styrax japonicus Roseus, which is known on the RHS database as Styrax japonicus Benibana Group, is different from the species, Styrax roseus, which I'm not familiar with.
Thanks for the correction, growin. I'd meant that this tree was known as roseus here and not 'Pink Chimes', but I did misrepresent what you said when I assumed that "roseus" should have been the species name instead of a cultivar name because I found so few hits on it as a cultivar of S. Japonicus.
'Benibana' in Japan = pink seedlings. 'Pink Chimes' ('Rosea', 'Pink Charm') was imported and introduced to the US as 'Benibana'. So you could think of 'Benibana' is a Cultivar Group or other aggregation, with 'Pink Chimes' being a clonal selection from that Group. Possibly it is the only one likely to be encountered here, at least under ordinary circumstances. Maybe Google "styrax pink" to see what's out there.
Yes, that's how I came to assume that it must be 'Pink Chimes' and then was surprised to find growin showing it by another name, so it didn't seem any more like it "must be" that. Off topic, what surprises me about Google is how fast the postings from here show up. Ron's posting from an hour and a half ago (when I started this note before a friend phoned) came up 6th on the list.
