Parrotia persica 'Red October'

Philippe de Spoelberch received this plant as a seedling from Dominique Duhaut, who collected the seed in Azerbaijan. Philippe selected it because of its returning beautiful orange-red to wine-red autumn color and decided with Paul Reimer, a nurseryman from Canada, to call it 'Red October'. It is a dense, broad and low-branched tree with very hard wood (hence the English name Persian ironwood). The young leaves are bronze-red in spring and turn green in summer. Throughout autumn, and already starting at a young age, the color evolves from orange-yellow to red and even purple in all gradations. It rather becomes a broad shrub than a tree: at the age of 20, the plant has a circumference of 77cm measured at 60cm height, a total height of 3.5m, and a crown of 7m wide. According to Paul Reimer, if pruned regularly from a young age, it can obtain a more columnar shape.