Old grape varieties

The approaching Christmas reminded me of the grape with rum my grandfather used to prepare for every Christmas. He filled a jar with large grapes, and filled it first with sugar, then with rum. Then we put it on the top of the cupboard and opened it on Christmas evening. He usually used the grape sorts “Goat’s udder” or “Queen of vineyards” for this, or “Muscat of Hamburg” for a dark version.

I thought I’d see if any of these varieties are now available, and I am glad to have found a number of internet stores where they sell many old sorts of grapes:

János Kovács vine and graft nursery, Gyöngyös – also selling varieties recommended for bio production

Kert-tó web store

Nyír-Salix Ltd

Dessert grape store – They sell both dessert and vine grape, including some which can be grown without spraying. Their photos are beautiful, so you are recommended to check them even if you did not want to grow vine – at least until then, because they will make you wish to do so.

Dessert grape and graft center, Abasár – They also sell vine grapes and resistant varieties.

If you know more shops or you have more experiences in this topic, you’re welcome to share them!

Haschberg elder, juneberry, cornel…

I hoped I would be able to complete an overview on groundcovers, but I’m still far from it. Thus I only post some new photos on the garden.

In the meantime I want to tell that recently I was in the Silvanus Nursery, one of the best retail sellers in the northern part of Budapest, to buy a Haschberg elder. This is an Austrian selection that produces much and evenly. In Hungary it is quite difficult to get it. In the Silvanus they sell plants of 40-60 cms in height for less than three euros. It grows quickly, so within two or three years even this small one will get a proper bush. And its price is pocket-friendly too. In the Praskac you get the same for 11.80.

Besides elder, they also have a very good kind of juneberry (Amelanchier lamarckii) on sale, for about the same price. In the Praskac this size is 9.70 euro if you have much luck, but more probably 17.70 or 26.50. It will grow four or five meters on any soil, it tolerates dryness, has a beautiful autumn color – and produces very tasty berries, similar to those of cranberry in size and taste. They also had some nice cornels and inermous rose-hips as well, for about two euros a plant. They also had a large offer of cranberries, but it is only recommended to those whose garden has sour soil and plenty of water.

Those wonderful barberries! 1. Berberis koreana

One of my great favorites. An extremely sturdy shrub which is beautiful all year long.

This is how it looks like in the spring, when the leaves spring up.

In May, when in blossom.

This is its summer shape. I find that it enhances the Oriental character of its environment. And it is a rather shady part of the garden, with heavy clay for soil. It is almost impossible to find a plant that grows well here. Although I water here (if you compare the spring and winter images you can see that it grew like fool), but according to Praskac it endures dryness as well.

It is about 1.5-2 meters high, and although most pages underestimate its dimensions, I think it will be at least 3 meters wide. Its berries are eaten in its native Corea.

It can be brought by us as well. In the Zöld Király nursery I always see one of its sports.

Alternative fruits in the garden 2.

Alternative fruits in our garden A - F:
Some pages put in this class the various berries and rhubarb, while others not. As they in fact offer alternatives to our more usual fruits, therefore I include them in my list.

- Aronia prunifolia 'Viking': (the same plant also comes with the name Aronia melanocarpa 'Viking'). Black chokeberry comes from Northern America. It is written to be very hardy (as its basic variant is in our garden in fact), produces abundant fruit, and its berry has a high content of vitamin C. It has a wonderful autumn color.
- Amelanchier laevis 'Balerina': It tolerates dryness, has a beautiful color in the autumn, and its berries are edible.
- Amelanchier rotundifolia: Allegheny serviceberry, tolerates both dryness and shadow, has a beautiful autumn color and edible berries.
- Berberis vulgaris: Barberry tolerates both dryness and part-shadow. It produces tasty sourish berries that are much appreciated in Persian kitchen. When in last autumn we were in Iran, it was sold everywhere.

- Chaenomeles 'Cido': Flowering quince, produced for its fruit. It is harsh when raw, but very tasty when preserved. In the spring it has beautiful salmon-colored flowers. Those reading in German can read a detailed description here.
- Cornus mas: A good entry on cornels can be read in the Wikipedia in English, and on the page of the Terra Alapítvány in Hungarian. In our garden it was one of the first plants. It tolerates well dry part-shadow and has a very tasty fruit.
- Corylus avellana: Our backward fence is made of hazel. In the year they started to produce hazelnuts, the squirrels appeared, and since then they have stayed in our garden, to our great pleasure.
- Corylus avellana 'Anny's Red Dwarf': We found in the Praskac this small hazel that in the spring has wine red leaves. As it will only grow one and half meter, it fits to much more gardens than the basic variant or any other hazels with colored leaves that all grow at least three meters high. However, I do not know whether it produces nuts.
- ! Corylus avellana 'Contorta': Corkscrew hazel is an exceptionally beautiful plant. In winter and early spring it is one of the main ornaments of our garden. It has been growing at us for twelve years. Before buying it, we asked a very renowned gardener whether it produces fruit. Oh yes, of course, just like normal hazel. Nevertheless, I have never seen any nuts on it. All right, I thought, perhaps it tooks to produce a bit longer than to the normal version. Now, as I was looking for links for this post, on a number of reliable sites I found that although it blooms, it does not produce fruit at all.

- Corylus colurna: Turkish hazel likes light, warm soil, where it grows quickly after the first few years. At us it even grew one and half meter in a year. It is a very beautiful tree, with nice catkins in the spring and appealing color in the autumn. It produces very tasty nuts, but unfortunately not as much as one would like: our twenty years old tree for example only two or three kilos a year. I recommend it only for natural gardens, because otherwise you have to continuously sweep its catkins in the spring and the shells of its fruits in the autumn.
- Crataegus monogyna: When I was a child, we often went to excursions. I especially liked to go in the autumn, and one of the main reasons was hawthorn. After its fruit softened a bit, I fould it very appealing. On the advice of a gardener we have planted a looong hawthorn fence all along our forest border. This belonged to those advices that fundamentally shaked my confidence in Hungarian gardeners (my respect to the extremely few and honest exceptions). In that cool and shady place hawthorn just manages to survive, but is rare and ugly. And it only bears fruit at those few points where it gets a bit more sunshine than usual.

- Fragaria ananassa 'Ostara': A strawberry that has stood the test in Germany for a long time. I will test it only now, hoping that every good thing they write about it is true.
- Fragaria vesca: In 2005 we have planted some woodland strawberries from the nearby forest. They cover the soil very well, but have not produced fruits this far, I don’t know why. Now I have seen some buds on them, so perhaps in this year.
- Fragaria vesca 'Mignonette': This plant, however, is a complete success story. I brought its seeds in 2005 from Britain, of which a gardener friend of us made seedligs in 2006. (He also sells them now, see among my links under the name Etnoflora.) It bears fruits from the beginning of the summer till the end of autumn. It does not spread. It tolerates well part-shadow, bad soil and dryness. Naturally, the better the conditions, the better it produces as well.

Alternative fruits in the garden 1.

This is how the Germans call those wild or semi-wild fruits that are also cultivated in home gardens. They usually do not require any pruning (or just very little). They are usually very resistent. They require no spraying. They often resist in extreme conditions. Many of them produce fruits just as tasty as the well-known ones, and many of them offer food for the animals living in the garden. And, in top of all that, most of them assume wonderful colors in the autumn. And they are available on a very large scale.

I started to look for them when our efforts to produce fruits failed in our cool and shady garden, right at the edge of the forest, in spite of all our ambitions. We have planted every possible kind of fruits, selecting complete sequences of breeds. We pruned, we sprayed, we manured, we irrigated, but after seven or eight years we had to realize that it does not go. The trees – except for the nedlar and some berries – hardly produced any fruits, and a number of them simply died out in spite of all our care.

Between 2004-2005 I decided that if an orchard is not sustainable then it should be converted into a decorative garden. True, Tamás told that the two are not mutually exclusive, but I dogmatically proclaimed that no fruit trees and shrubs fit in a decorative garden. Therefore, apart from the medlar – and the three peaches, champions of survival – I digged out all the rest. (Fortunately most trees were so stunted that I could give them to the neighbors.)


However, the concept of the decorative garden did not result unproblematic, either. On the one hand I had problems to find plants fitting for the bad soil, the dry places and the part-shadow that makes the greater part of the garden. On the other hand I missed very much that wonderful “red jam” I used to produce of blackcurrant, raspberry and other berries. So I revised my aesthetic principles and immediately found some place fitting for berries. And while I was looking for plants for dry part-shadow, I met the alternative fruits.

By now I have collected a complete set of them. And as most of them are originally forest plants, therefore they fit very well in our natural garden.

More on them in Hungarian:
Erdeigyümölcs-lap.

Some German pages for the interested:
Gärtenrei Naturwuchs.
Artener Bio-Baumschulbetrieb.
Eggert Baumschulen.

Cornelian cherry (Cornus mas)

This is the flower of the cornel. Beautiful, isn’t it?

This cornel was one of the first plants we planted in our garden. Someone told in the nursery how lucky we are that they even sell cornel now. At that time I felt the garden infinitely large, and so I thought well, then let us buy one of this, too. At home we put it at the end of the garden.

It was not an especially attractive plant. In the first years only some sad rods protruded from the earth. I did not dig it out only because I had no time for it.

I began to change my opinion when it started to bloom a little bit more. Apart from the twisted hazelnut, this is one of the first shrubs that blooms at the same time with the early goldenrods. After some time I found its flowers so much more refined that I gave the goldenrod to someone. But it became my real favorite when it produced so many berries that there remained some to me as well after the thrushes. (Seven years were necessary to reach this production.) It is very tasty. I like it the best when completely ripe, with gypsy toast (bread plunged in eggs and then fried in oil).

height: 3-5 meters
width: 3-5 meters - I read that it is also suitable for cut fence. I cut ours only once a little bit, but it took that in bad part.
American hardiness zone: Z4 (down to -32 ºC)
bloom: in early spring
fruit: small red oval berries at the end of summer, sweet if you leave them ripe completely.
demand of light: It likes sunshine, but also survives in part-shadow.
demand of soil: It prefers light, permeable soil (like at us), but they say it lives on any soil.
demand of water: It likes water, although at us it grows on a rather dry soil.

detailed description: University of Connecticut Plant Database - Don’t panic if in the beginning it grows extremely slowly. Even this database writes that it gets stable very slowly.
It is worth to check the complete database, they give very detailed and reliable descriptions.