{"id":2643,"date":"2019-02-11T07:44:24","date_gmt":"2019-02-11T15:44:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/?p=2643"},"modified":"2019-02-11T07:44:24","modified_gmt":"2019-02-11T15:44:24","slug":"the-taming-of-the-quince","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/the-taming-of-the-quince\/","title":{"rendered":"The Taming of the Quince"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"floweirng<\/a>Winter has temporarily abated, with temperatures consistently above freezing and even jumping into spring-like territory.\u00a0 The weekend looks promising.\u00a0 It is past time for me to prune the flowering quince.<\/p>\n

That sounds like a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and it would be, except for one small detail\u2014the flowering quince, or Chaenomeles speciosa, is armed and dangerous.\u00a0 The now-bare branches of this deciduous shrub are laden with thorns.\u00a0 Those sharp stemmed projections are not just your garden variety rose barbs, but needle-pointed prickles, each of which is a couple of inches long.\u00a0 Not only is pruning the quince perilous, but getting rid of the branches is difficult.\u00a0 They rip even the sturdiest garden waste bags as if they were tissue and don\u2019t break down easily in the compost pile, even when the branches are chopped into relatively small lengths.\u00a0 Chipping them is probably the best way, but I don\u2019t have a chipper\/shredder yet.\u00a0 Given that the quince is not going anywhere, I may have to invest in one.<\/p>\n

Flowering quince comes by its barbed nature honestly, because it is a card-carrying member of the rose or Rosaceae family.\u00a0 Its relatives include the often thorny garden rose, not to mention such prickly horticultural specimens as blackberries and raspberries.\u00a0 Of course, it is also related to fruiting quince or Cydonia oblonga, which does not have thorns.\u00a0 Flowering quince is probably a little more beautiful in bloom than its fruiting relative.\u00a0 Perhaps the thorns are simply the price of beauty.<\/p>\n

Philosophical considerations aside, my quince is too big.\u00a0 It is a large, spreading shrub, currently about seven feet tall and six feet wide.\u00a0 Its topmost branches are festooned with sweet autumn clematis, an opportunistic, self-sown vine that pays its way by flowering beautifully in the fall and providing interesting seedheads thereafter.\u00a0 \u00a0Like the quince, the sweet autumn clematis covers more territory every year.<\/p>\n

Pruning the shrub will inevitably result in loss of much of the clematis, but since the vine is virtually unkillable, I am not worried.\u00a0 The job will also deprive me and the neighborhood of many spring blossoms, and that bothers me a bit.\u00a0 While the topmost branches would not have borne flowers until next year, the pruning effort has to extend to mature, flower-bearing stems.\u00a0 I can see the little buds already, even though they are unlikely to unfurl for at least eight weeks.<\/p>\n

Still, I have neglected serious quince pruning for a couple of years and that means that necessary losses will occur.\u00a0 It is too soon to save some of those branches by plunging them into water and \u201cforcing\u201d them into early bloom, so they will be casualties of the process.\u00a0 The sad truth is that nature and pruning are always about short-term loss in the service of longer term gain.<\/p>\n

The loss that really concerns me is blood loss.\u00a0 To make this less likely, I will don my elbow-length rose gauntlets for the job and use long-handled loppers.\u00a0 I have no intention of getting up close and personal with the branches as I prune, either.\u00a0 Barring the arrival of a chipper-shredder, I will chop the pruned branches into short lengths, compost them, and hope for the best.<\/p>\n

I anthropomorphize plants too much, but I know that the quince will not mind being barbered and will only be semi-tamed.\u00a0 The remaining branches will go about the task of fulfilling the biological imperative and producing the pink buds that will ultimately lead to pinkish white flowers.\u00a0 A few branches will revert to the deeper coral color of some of their quince forbearers.\u00a0 The oval-shaped leaves will cloak those branches and the long thorns will do their job, whatever that may be.\u00a0 I suspect that they protected ancient quinces from predators.<\/p>\n

Though flowering quince is supposed to be sterile, a few of those quince flowers will be pollinated and produce fruit.\u00a0 Last year my harvest was about ten golden-green quinces of varying sizes.\u00a0 If that happens again this year, perhaps I will finally make a batch of sweet quince paste, or membrillo, to serve with cheese next winter.\u00a0 It will be a sweet reward for the prickly job of the taming of the quince.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Winter has temporarily abated, with temperatures consistently above freezing and even jumping into spring-like territory.\u00a0 The weekend looks promising.\u00a0 It is past time for me to prune the flowering quince. That sounds like a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and it would be, except for one small detail\u2014the flowering quince, or Chaenomeles speciosa, is armed … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,2,3,5],"tags":[555,2043,553,81,488,2042,513],"class_list":["post-2643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall","category-general-interest","category-spring","category-summer","category-winter","tag-chaenomeles-speciosa","tag-cydona-oblonga","tag-flowering-quince","tag-pruning","tag-rose-family","tag-spring-blooming-shrubs","tag-winter-garden-chores"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2643"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2643\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2647,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2643\/revisions\/2647"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}