Adam's Laburnum

One tree, three colours of flower, and a nurseryman's accident from 1825 behind all of it. In that year the Parisian grower Jean Louis Adam grafted a purple broom onto a common laburnum, and instead of the graft simply taking, the join itself started sprouting shoots built from both plants at once. What grew is a chimaera: a single tree with two identities running through it, propagated ever since from that one plant. Some branches flower laburnum yellow, some broom purple, some a dull pink that is neither. Manchester has one, in Didsbury, and the council's tree survey lists it as a champion in the Tree Register of the British Isles, which keeps Britain's record specimens. Didsbury Civic Society, describing the walled Parsonage Gardens beside the Old Parsonage, calls it a very rare example of early bio-engineering that still survives, which is a fair description of a plant that has been quietly outliving its own novelty for two centuries. Nothing dates this particular tree, so it earns its place on rarity rather than age. Go in late May or June. Out of flower it is a small, ordinary-looking tree with a remarkable story, and in flower it is the only thing in the garden anyone looks at.