Quince Blossom...
Sugar Pink... never sickly
The sub-heading is from an article "Quince among men" by popular UK TV gardening celeb Monty Don writing in The Observer Magazine Oct. 24 2004...
...But there, solitary and at first hidden, is the best thing I have seen in this garden for weeks and weeks. A solitary quince, pearshaped, downy and lime green.
The tree laden with fruit is 'Lescovacz'. Two years ago it had 47 fruits, but last year not one, despite an incredible blossoming. Quince blossom is the best of all - a sugar pink that is never sickly. It comes late and stays for too short a time but is always breathtakingly beautiful.
Quince trees are self-fertile - so you can have just one and expect it to fruit - and grown on their own rootstock. Pears are almost inevitably grown on quince roots as well. This keeps pears small, whereas on its own roots a pear tree wants to become a large, even magnificent tree, more like a full-grown ash or beech...
In that short edited quote one can glean some idea of how prolific a Quince tree can be. However, I have drawn a blank on the blossom except that it is pink or white (sometimes striped with red like a barber's pole), has five petals, flowers at the end of a branch in May and June in England (here in central France the flowers are almost over by mid-April). Much more information is available on the tree and how to grow it... but most of what is written is on the unusual hard, tart fruit and what to do with it. As I'm illustrating the blossom I will have to pass on the marmalade and jelly recipes until the autumn when I have fruits to hand both for the kitchen and to photograph.
Having said that, the most interesting information I have found so far on the net is from the excellent and entertaining Vegetarians in Paradise site, followed by the usual Wikipedia entry - which is always good value.
The photographs were equally challenging to do... standing on a garden wall made composition and framing difficult as the delicate flower petals and downy covered leaves danced about in the swirling breeze. A touch of fill-in from the Nikon D200 pop-up flash helped me out with the wide shot of the tree taken with a 24-85mm F/3.5-4.5 G set at 24mm (this cheapish autofocus Nikkor has become my walkabout / cycle-about lens because the focal length range covers my requirements about 90% of the time).
The close-up shot was of a couple of flowering stems placed in a jar of water and taken with an old manual 80-200mm f/4 Nikkor zoom of 1970s vintage. I'm loathe to get rid of that lens because it owes me nothing and I will get very little for it on the second-hand market... but a new 70-200mm f/2.8 AF zoom is on order from Robert White - not for the speed of the lens or the autofocus... as I shoot so much nowadays using a Gitzo monopod (without a pan / tilt head or monoball to keep it lighter) I need the lens' tripod collar to rapidly switch the camera / lens orientation from horizontal to vertical.
Summer Quince
Art Print
Morris, William
18 in. x 36 in.
Buy at AllPosters.com
Framed Mounted
10:18:31 PM 
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