Chaenomeles

Photography Color Challenge Green
Thursday 2 August 2018

Made a surprising discovery yesterday.

Wood fruit!

I've lived in the same house for almost 15 years. When my family moved in, there already existed two bushes—one on the north side and one on the south. These bushes have produced bright red flowers every spring. We (my wife and I) always referred to them as firebushes. Yesterday I discovered what the bushes actually are.

The surprise is that it took 15 years to discover a truth about something right under my nose, right in front of my eyes. But here are some pictures of the fruit, before I tell more of the story:

I think I counted 8 or 9 fruits altogether.

About ten years ago, after we noticed year after year that the northern bush produced a lot more flowers than the south, I moved the southern bush to the north side of the yard where it would get more sun. Then five years or so ago I made a third bush by digging up a new growth (from root growth).

Here's a close up I posted two months ago (where I incorrectly identified it). And another.

Here's a picture of the three bushes—red flowers blooming, along the north side of my yard in the Spring of 2017, a couple of years after transplant. The bush in the foreground is the one that has produced the fruit. The middle bush is barely visible. The bush farthest away is the oldest. As you can see, in 2017 the oldest bush produced the most flowers and the (foreground) newest one the least. The middle bush (the one I moved from the shady side of the yard to the sunny side) is almost not even visible.

Here is the fruit-producing bush this Spring (2018) with the most flowers (and the middle bush is visible):

You can see just how much the bush has grown in one year.

The flowers arrive first, almost ahead of the leaves:

But the leaves soon follow:

Not once in the 15 years I've lived here have I detected these fruit. Even now, only the youngest of the three bushes has produced fruit.

I suspect I haven't been properly pruning the bushes.

After discovering the fruit, I did some research and have determined that these bushes are actually Chaenomeles speciosa, the Chinese flowering quince or some related species. As you can tell from the pictures, The Chaenomeles fruit, a close relative of apples and pears is also called mugua.

These fruit supposedly are too tart to be eaten directly, but they can be used in other ways. I look forward to exploring those possibilities.

Pocket computer photos/gif