bay laurel

order: laurales
family: lauraceae
genus: laurus
species: nobilis

First Story

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8 december 2014

plant with stem thinner than pencil when separated from the mother plant. 2012.

Bay laurel is a plant many of us are familiar with or have at least heard of in any language. Given its historical significance especially in the form of symbolic or decorative wreaths in the classical context, this plant is more or less inscribed on the facade of the western society. Although native to the Mediterranean region, today the use of its aromatic leaves in culinary is so very common worldwide. In Chinese literature, it is compared to osmanthus, yet another much praised plant for its ornamental and culinary values. In Chinese language, bay laurel is known as 月桂 (yue gui), which is literally translated as "moon osmanthus".

After our first bay laurel purchased at a discounted price got stolen right after we put it back out after the winter, I was for the first time devastated and became more alert with casual garden thieves. We waited a season till we finally acquired another one. This time I separated some stems from the multiple-stem bush to make new trees and hide them in different spots in the garden. One hides under a bush; the next in between other potted plants; one behind the pond; and yet another down the steps towards the basement. Given different growing conditions,some grow more vigorously than others. The trees that do grow, gradually gain some thickness in their stems.

One of the separated plant gets to receive special treatment. It gets the sunniest spot in our garden during summer, where space has become scarce and gets shelter from minus degrees in the stairwell where I store my very carefully selected subtropical and less winter hardy plants. The rest are put at the North side of our house all year round which only receives a couple of direct sunlight in summer mornings and have to endure winter cold. The difference in growth is surprisingly apparent. Since the specially treated plant is exposed to hot sun throughout most of the day, the medium it grows in dries up a lot quicker and that means i also need to water it a lot more often. I feed my plants with mixed manure pellets. With the plant that needs frequent watering manure pellets break down very quickly. Therefore I added new pellets and new nutrients to it with shorter intervals. Although there is only one flush of new growth for each plant, which usually happens when it starts to get warm enough in late spring, the plant that receives more sunlight, more water and more nutrients can do a lot more photosynthesis than others, and the result can be seen in the thickening of its trunk. That being said, it is still a relatively slow growing tree. It will not become a convincing specimen tree in less than a decade and especially not in our area.

I really like my trees to ramify nicely. When I need to harvest some leaves for cooking, I usually look for older leaves with visible swollen axillary buds. By taking off the leaves at this stage, where the buds have already been well fed, the buds will less likely be starved and aborted. In fact by cutting of the auxin flow, the buds will be triggered to elongate and form new branches in the coming season.