My relationship with the Forsythia bush has long been strained. While I always appreciated its early blooming period, often the very first plant to bravely put forth any blossoms at such a precarious point in time, the rest of the plant, and even the flowers themselves, have proven problematic for my admittedly fastidious, and perhaps unfair, viewpoint.
As mentioned, Forsythia is known best for its bright yellow blooms, seen here on a few nursery specimens (because I absolutely will not grow this in our yard). They are a happy mark that signals the return of spring, and warmer weather to come. Their drawbacks are that while stunning in color, in form the flower branches are often bare at top and between the blooms, making it necessary to drastically prune for any sort of arrangement. They also generally appear on straight and rigid stems, giving a somewhat unnatural and stilted appearance.
More problematic for me is the rest of the plant and its growing style. With the exception of some rigid stems bearing flowers, the rest of the new shoots are wild and wiry, issuing forth from the center of the plant and going absolutely everywhere without rhyme or reason. They will grow tall, to the point where they flop over and start rooting in the soil – a method of propagation that might work well in the wild, but absolutely ruins any hope of landscaping order. It goes against my very Virgo nature, and while I have learned to appreciate such wild wanderings from some plants, the forsythia doesn’t appeal to me in many other ways to change my view. As such, I admire these plants from a distance, just at this particular time of the year, and move on to warmer days as quickly as possible.
