Abies koreana ‘Blauer Eskimo’ (Korean Fir)

This compact conifer (yes, we do sell the odd conifer if we like it) can be grafted to make a charming mini standard, which is how we usually grow them on the nursery. Left to their own devices and on their own trunks these fuzzballs will be low and spreading creatures that hug the ground. Definitely nice but we have a few others in the nursery that do that perfectly well already. Thus, we offer these elevated ones which have their pretty bun-like forms hoiked-up up a bit to make the most of their silhouette and cloudy architecture.

Achingly slow to grow: the prominent winter buds on the resinous glaucous foliage give only a centimetre of growth in a year. Newbie gardeners frothing with enthusiasm may blanche at committing to something so ponderous: we’ve all been there, cramming our plots with luxuriant and fast-growing stuff that riots with abundance and fills-out quickly. How proudly we survey our insta-gardens with all the gaps filled-in. But then a few seasons of hacking-out rampant and overbearing thugs and pruning back skipfulls of oh-god-it’s-lifting-the-patio errors later, you’ve seen the light (literally: that Thuja too close to the house was expensive to deal with wasn’t it) and mended your ways. Slow and steady is the way of all good things (mostly) and that’s why we like these chaps. Graceful, compactly- architectural and season after season a reliable investment in living art.

We do concede that conifers are a bit of a marmite plant, but they do bring an unsurpassed evergreen texture and form to a design especially in winter gardens. They are a must for acid free draining soil. Our garden designers  place them into Japanese designs to compliment and contrast with Acers, Rhododendrons, Pieris and Skimmias.  They are fantastic in pots, too, creating those living artworks we were just enthusing about.

Best in a moist, fertile but well-drained soil in a sunny spot.

Korean Firs have been the subject of intense growing and fiddling: way back the principal aim was to breed a generously-branched blue fir which could be grown speedily into attractive Christmas Trees. All sorts of mad things were attempted including irradiating seed, grafting, cross-pollinating and who-knows-what. Among other results, ‘Blauer Eskimo’ was discovered as a mutation on a single branch of another variety ‘Blauer Pfiff’. Who names these? We love them.