Winter Flowers: The Witch Hazels

In the Garden with Andrew

Andrew Bunting. Photo courtesy of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society.

With its considerable snow cover and many cold days, this winter has felt longer than most. Nonetheless, I have been making an effort to get out and visit public gardens and landscapes. Fortunately, as vice president of public horticulture at the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, I can do this as part of my job. Two afternoons a week, I go to Meadowbrook Farm, our public garden in Jenkintown, Montgomery County. 

At Meadowbrook Farm, several cultivars of witch hazel — Hamamelis x intermedia — are in full flower. Recently, I visited Longwood Gardens and saw stunning specimens of my favorite witch hazel, Hamamelis x intermedia ‘Jelena’.  Like many witch hazels, it can start flowering anywhere between early January and mid-February, depending on the year and the selection.

Hamamelis x intermedia ‘Jelena’ has narrow, spider-leg-like petals. Somewhat crinkled when fully extended on sunny winter days, on cold winter nights they curl up and retract. ‘Jelena’ has stunning tri-colored flowers of orange, burgundy, and yellow. The flowers of this Pennsylvania Horticultural Society Gold Medal Plant recipient are also beautifully perfumed, making its branches perfect to cut and bring inside. (See swat.ink/gold-medal-plants for a list of other Gold Medal designees.) At maturity, this witch hazel can either be trained as a vase-shaped small tree reaching 15 feet or be grown as a multi-stemmed large shrub as wide as it is tall. While I would not call ‘Jelena’ definitively deer proof, it is generally more deer resistant than many other shrubs. Similar in color but with paler tones is an equally attractive cultivar called ‘Strawberries and Cream’. 

There are many outstanding golden-yellow witch hazel selections. In early March at Longwood, ‘Barmstedt Gold’ is in full flower. Exceptional yellow-flowering selections including ‘Primavera’, which is upright with a vase-shaped habit, and ‘Wisley Supreme’. For years, ‘Arnold Promise’ was a popular cultivar, but now it is among the handful prone to the disfiguring disease witch hazel blight. Several cultivars have pale-yellow, butter-yellow, or sulfur-colored flowers, including another Gold Medal recipient, Hamamelis x intermedia ‘Pallida’. 

Hamamelis x intermedia ‘Jelena’ — the author’s favorite witch hazel — has tri-colored flowers of orange, burgundy, and yellow. Photo: Andrew Bunting

Many public gardens in our area have extensive witch hazel collections on public display, including the Scott Arboretum at Swarthmore College, the Morris Arboretum of the University of Pennsylvania, Longwood Gardens, Stoneleigh Gardens in Villanova, and the Mt. Cuba Center in Delaware. The last two feature many native witch hazels.

Hamamelis x intermedia ‘Jelena’. Photo: Andrew Bunting

One of the earliest of all the witch hazels to flower is a Scott Arboretum selection of a Chinese witch hazel, Hamamelis mollis. ‘Early Bright’ was selected for its very early bright-yellow flowers and superior fragrance. Typically, it begins flowering in mid-January, and flowering can last for up to a month, as long as the days are cool. Scott Arboretum’s fragrance garden features one specimen espaliered, or trained, to one of its walls. This is a great way to display witch hazels.

While many of the most ornamental witch hazels are hybrids of Asian descent (Hamamelis x intermedia is a cross between the Japanese species Hamamelis japonica and the Chinese H. mollis), some notable species are native to the United States. Hamamelis virginiana, the common witch hazel, has a broad native range, from Maine south to Florida and west to Texas, Missouri, and Minnesota. In Swarthmore, it is a common understory shrub in our native woodlands. In the wild, this lanky shrub differs from most other witch hazels by blooming not in winter, but rather as its leaves are turning yellow in the fall, which means its flowers often go unnoticed. You can buy a witch hazel astringent — considered to be a cure-all for many ailments, including a multitude of skin conditions — in any drugstore. 

I also saw a stunning, very large specimen of the Ozark witch hazel, Hamamelis vernalis, at Longwood Gardens. In the wild, it grows only in Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas. This plant can grow to 20 feet tall with a massive, 40-foot spread. Its coppery flowers are similar in color to ‘Jelena’, but the petals are shorter and stouter. Like ‘Jelena’, it has a wonderful fragrance. Typically, Hamamelis vernalis blooms from February through March. Many witch hazels have orange-yellow fall color, but H. vernalis can have purple tones. Notable selections include ‘Sandra’, with its slightly larger flowers, and the more diminutive ‘Quasimodo’.

Local garden centers are a great place to buy witch hazels. If you are looking for additional variety, try mail-order nurseries like Rare Find Nursery and Broken Arrow Nursery. 

Send your gardening questions to editor@swarthmorean.com. Put “Garden” in the subject line.

Andrew Bunting is vice president of public horticulture at the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society and vice president of the Swarthmore Horticultural Society.