Yellow fruitfulness: These evergreens with bright lemon clusters cheer up dull winter days

Serendipity is always unexpected, especially in a budget airport hotel. My bleak little bedroom overlooked a dense bank of glossy, evergreen foliage. Every upright stem carried a big cluster of butter-yellow flowers at its tip.

If I’d opened the window, the sweet fragrance of Mahonia japonica would have wafted into the charmless room. But the damn thing was stuck and wouldn’t budge.

That’s when serendipity banished my rage. A flock of beautiful little birds moved among the flowers.

They were blackcaps small warblers with dark heads. With insects in short supply, they were feeding on nutritious nectar and pollen from the yellow flowers.

Mahonias aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. Some have gawky growth and most are prickly. But being evergreen and with many winter-flowering, they have great garden value.

Their flowers, arranged in thick clusters or along slender stalks, can be extremely pretty.

They are also frost-proof, durable and remarkably long-lasting.

Mahonias are wildlife-friendly, too hence the blackcaps outside my hotel. In years gone by, those and other warblers would leave Britain to overwinter near the Mediterranean.

But since climate change, blackcaps and other warblers have become common here, even in winter. Some even fly north from continental Europe, where winters are colder.

TOUGH SHRUBS 

Of all mahonias, Oregon grape or M. aquifolium is the most common and easiest to grow. Developing as a scruffy, evergreen shrub, it grows roughly a metre high, spreading to about 1.5 metres. The compound leaves carry leaflets which resemble holly. But the prickles are softer, so less painful to touch.

From spring into summer, the shrubs are crowded with tight clusters of intense yellow, nectar-rich flowers. Blue-black berries follow. Native to the Rockies and western North America, Mahonia repens grows larger, with less prickly leaves. The form Rotundifolia has rounded to oval, sparsely prickled leaves.

Despite their scruffy shapes, M. repens and M. aquifolium can look charming in full flower and again in autumn when the smoky blue-black berries appear. Their leaves often develop subtle autumn hues, too.

Taller, with a shapely outline, M. japonica is probably the finest of all species. Flowering from November to mid spring, with delicious lily-of-the-valley fragrance it belongs in every garden. There are outstanding japonica hybrids, too. One of the best, M. media results from crossing M. japonica with M.lomariifolia.

The flowers are a stronger yellow and more upright, resembling shuttlecocks.

The popular M. Charity has elegant flower spikes. But its fragrance is less intense than with M. japonica.