Koelreuteria paniculata

October

It imposes itself in every picture of our garden in early autumn: an orange dome that lasts for weeks until wind or frost dismantles it, rising above the gateway that leads to the churchyard next door.

Its ‘common’ name (though less heard these days than its botanical one) is Golden Rain Tree, or alternatively Pride of India. Since it is Chinese and its yellow flowers stick up rather than rain down neither name is particularly apt.

A broad dome of yellow flowers in late summer, before Hoheria and Eucryphia begin to flower, is its principal virtue. The succeeding fruit, displayed above the foliage, are pink bladders containing the seeds – which frequently turn out fertile. We often find useful seedlings in beds near the tree. They grow on rapidly at first, then develop slowly as big multi-stemmed bushes. Ours is 20 feet high and 30 wide after 50 years. It was originally planted with a Mount Etna broom, Genista aetnensis, in the same planting hole, an ingenious wheeze to engineer two succeeding flushes of yellow flowers. They grew together in close embrace for 20 years or so before the broom gave up the ghost.

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