Viburnum grandiflorum Wall. ex DC.

Native of the Himalaya from Chamba eastward, possibly extending into parts of western China; introduced from Bhutan by Roland Cooper for A. K. Bulley in 1914. In its wood it is quite as hardy as V. farreri, but the flowers are more likely to be damaged or destroyed by frost. The two are closely allied, but V. grandiflorum differs in having the undersides of the leaves, the inflorescence-axes and inner bud-scales densely hairy, and in the longer corolla-tubes of its flowers. As seen in gardens it is of different aspect, with its rather gaunt habit. Its flowers vary in colour as they do in V. farreri. The flowers are usually bright rosy pink and fade only gradually to white as they age, but some plants of the Cooper introduction had almost white flowers.

The form described in 1844 from a specimen collected by Jacquemont, the French traveller, was formerly recognised as a distinct species, V. foetens, now synonymised with V. grandiflorum. Found in the more westerly part of the species’ range, it is thought to have been introduced to commerce by Messrs Marchant from seeds collected (according to their 1937 catalogue) by Capt. Simpson-Hayward. In 1934 George M. Taylor, the well-known plantsman, of Longniddry, East Lothian, received seeds from which he raised two plants, one of which (with unusually short corolla tubes) was sent to Kew, together with seeds. The only real distinguishing character of this form is that the leaves are glabrous, or almost so, beneath and that the inflorescence too is glabrous, except at the nodes; however, some garden plants of this provenance are very distinct in their roundish, stiff habit, stout branchlets, and late-winter anthesis. (When enquiries were made early in the 1950s about the provenance of the seeds, Mr Taylor said they had been collected in Korea, outside this species’ range – and where V. farreri is only grown as a cultivated plant. It seems likely that Mr Taylor’s memory betrayed him, and that the seed was in fact collected in the western Himalaya.)