Euonymus phellomanus Seeds | Corkwing Euonymus
LATIN NAME: Euonymus phellomanus
COMMON NAME: Corkwing Euonymus, Cork-Barked Spindle
Plant Profile
The name was published by the German botanist Ludwig Loesener in the early twentieth century, and it is descriptive rather than commemorative: the first element is the Greek noun for cork, and the second is a suffix meaning furnished with. So the botanical name says plainly that the plant is equipped with cork, and the English common names follow the same idea.
The fruit is a four-lobed capsule, and when it is ripe the valves bend back to expose the seeds, each one wrapped in a bright orange aril and left dangling for a short while on a thin thread of tissue. Pink shell, orange parcel, brown corky wood: the combination is one of the best small autumn spectacles in a cold garden, and it is at its strongest when the foliage is also turning pink and red before it falls.
The leaves colour in rose pink and scarlet, deepest in full sun on lime-rich, freely draining soil, while a shaded plant on wet ground turns a muddy bronze. The serious pest of the genus is Unaspis euonymi, which builds white, waxy shields along the stems and on the undersides of the leaves; a heavy infestation stunts the shrub and kills whole twigs, and the first sign is often sooty mould on the honeydew beneath the colony. Thin the plant so that air moves through it, cut out and burn the worst stems in winter, and let the parasitic wasp that attacks the scale work before reaching for an insecticide aimed at the young crawlers.
Science & Biotechnology
The genus defends itself with chemistry. The European spindle has yielded cardenolide glycosides such as evomonoside and sesquiterpene alkaloids of the evonine group, and the same classes of compound occur across the genus in the bark and the seed. For a gardener the practical point is simple: the capsules and seeds are emetic and purgative if eaten, livestock have been poisoned by browsing the shrubs, and the bright fruit should not be within reach of small children. Birds eat the aril and drop the stone, unharmed by what makes it dangerous to a mammal.
Uses & Benefits
The other corky euonymus in most gardens is the winged spindle, and the two are separated by the nature of the wings. In the winged spindle the ridges are thinner and more membranous, the shrub is lower and broader, and the autumn fruit is a duller red. In this Chinese species the ribs are rounded and fleshy rather than flat plates, the plant is taller, and the ripe capsule is a clear pink. The distinction matters in practice, because the winged spindle has become invasive in North American woodland and this species has not.
The common name spindle is a trade name, not a description. The European species has hard, fine-grained wood that was turned into the weighted spindles used for spinning wool by hand, and the same timber went into skewers, toothpicks and small domestic turnery. The generic name is stranger still, a Greek phrase meaning of good name, applied to a group of plants that are thoroughly poisonous, and the euphemism has been in botanical use since Linnaeus.
Growing from Seed
The ribs start as shallow furrows in the first year’s bark and thicken with age into free-standing wings, most striking on one-year and two-year wood. The habit is upright and open, three to five metres in cultivation, with opposite, finely toothed leaves about ten centimetres long. Because the ornament sits on young growth, pruning decides how much of it you ever see, and an unpruned specimen carries its cork above eye level.
Collect the capsules as the valves open, peel the orange aril away from each seed, and sow while the seed is still fresh in a loam-based mix opened up with grit. The embryo is not fully mature when the fruit sheds, so the seed needs a cool, damp period in a frame before it will sprout, and it often waits for a second spring. Keep the pots from drying out and from freezing solid, and pot the seedlings on before the taproot coils in the bottom of the container.
Prune in late winter, and prune more boldly than the plant’s slow growth suggests. Take out the oldest and thickest stems at the base so that young wood keeps coming, because the best cork and the best autumn colour are on young branches. Cutting a mature shrub hard every few years renews it entirely. Protect the young shoots from rabbits, which graze the thin bark where the cork is softest.
Our Take
I grow this shrub for the bark rather than the fruit, and it earns its place beside the pink-capsuled winged spindle and the heavier-fruited European spindle, where the three together show how varied one genus can be. Where space is tight, the small Chinese tree Bunge’s spindle gives the same autumn colour in a single stem.
Related Reading
More species in the same orbit as Corkwing Euonymus: