Nearly Equal Ironwood

Below is our stunning, seventeen year old specimen of the Subequal Ironwood, now measuring 30′ tall x 20′ wide. Below, is our plant this week, showing off it’s beautiful fall color in early November. Parrotia subaequalis is the Chinese version of the better known Persian ironwood, Parrotia persica. This is so rare in the wild, that there are now more plants in gardens than exist in situ, where only five populations are known. As a garden plant, Chinese ironwood is both easy to grow, and stunningly beautiful. The purple fall leaf color holds longer than any other deciduous tree in our garden. There have been only a few clonal introductions into cultivation, but most, including ours, is the cultivar, Parrotia subaequalis ‘Ogisu’.

The story of its discovery, which we’ve shared before is worth sharing again. In 1960, Chinese professor H.T. Chang published a new small tree which he thought to be a witch hazel, that he named Hamamelis subaequalis. The herbarium sheet (dead smashed plant), from which he named it, was actually a 25 year old specimen, collected in 1935, in Jiangsu Province. Since no one had recollected the same plant since then, Chang assumed it to be extinct. Then, 28 years later, it was rediscovered in 1988 by a team from the Jiangsu Institute of Botany. After studying live flowering specimens for three years, it became obvious to them, that it wasn’t a witch hazel at all, so it was renamed as a new genus, Shaniodendron. That name was used until 1997, when DNA analysis revealed that Shaniodendron was actually a second species in the formerly monotypic genus Parrotia….only living some 3,500 miles from its nearest relative in Iran.