Little Black Pine
Pinus thunbergii
Shohin, with bark that has no business on a tree this size
Slanting · 19 cm · c. 40 yrs
£4,200
Rarely offered
Six O’Clock
Chaenomeles japonica · Flowering quince
Fourteen centimetres, and it flowers like a shrub
Mame, properly — small enough to sit in a cupped hand, and it still carries eight or nine flowers in a good February. Named for the hour it gets the only direct light in the shohin house.
£2,400
Available
No tree leaves here on the strength of a photograph. Come and walk round it first — we will hold anything for a fortnight while you decide. Delivery is by hand, in our own van, anywhere in the British Isles.
Every tree goes with a year of aftercare: repotting when it wants it, winter cover, and a standing invitation to bring it back if it sulks. Most people use it. Nobody has ever been charged for it.
Arrange a viewingor ring the nursery on +44 1273 841 209
Through the year
- SpringFlowers first, leaves after, always
- SummerSmall glossy leaf, quietly getting on with it
- AutumnOccasionally a fruit, absurdly out of scale
- WinterBuds fat and red by January
The tree
- Style
- Informal upright · moyogi
- Age
- About 35 years old
- Training
- In training since 2004 · 22 years
- Height
- 14 cm
- Spread
- 19 cm
- Pot
- Glazed square, oxblood, unsigned
- Keeping it
- A pot this size dries in an afternoon in June. Water twice a day from May, and do not let anybody helpful put it in a saucer.
Where it came from
Struck from a cutting off a hedge in Lewes in 1990 and kept as a mame from the start, which is rarer than it sounds — most small trees are failed large ones. This one was never anything else.