Cotinus szechuanensis A. Pénzes

Cotinus szechuanensis was first described by the Hungarian botanist Antal Pénzes in 1958 from the Min valley around Lixian mountain, a warm and rather arid region in north-west Sichuan, China; it occupies a tiny territory within that of commoner and much more widely distributed Cotinus varieties currently attributed to C. coggygria, and it can be told by its smaller, almost round leaves which typically show an upturned ‘piecrust’ edge, so that they slightly recall metal bottletops; the plant shows good autumn colour. It is also a generally hairless species, even extending to the seed-head (Min & Barfod 2008), and is never more than a medium-sized bush.

This species was introduced to the west by Roy Lancaster, who collected seed in 1993 from some mounded 2.5 m clumps growing on a rocky slope below the town of Wenchuan (L 2028 collection notes). In cultivation it is assumed to need a warm dry sheltered spot (Edwards & Marshall 2019), but is robust enough to have been chosen by Peter Moore at the Hillier Nurseries in the 1990s to breed the compact purple-leaved C. DUSKY MAIDEN (‘Londus’). DUSKY MAIDEN is claimed to be easier to root from cuttings that its other parent, C. coggygria ‘Velvet Cloak’ (Hatch 2024), a quality inherited from the Chinese species; at the Hillier Nurseries, Alan Postill used to propagate Cotinus szechuanensis from new wood cuttings, taken with a heel around May (D. Jewell pers. comm. 2024).

Cotinus szechuanensis itself seems not to have been introduced to North America (where its potential hardiness remains unchecked), and currently teeters on the verge of extinction in English gardens; the one plant at the Sir Harold Hillier Gardens was stolen around 2001 (D. Jewell pers. comm. 2024). In 2024 a six-year-old accession at the Bedgebury National Pinetum in Kent – a rather frosty site – had made a fairly happy bush 1.2m tall, in a sandy soil of unusually low fertility (pers. obs.), and new material will be propagated from this in 2025.