Ribes sanguineum White Icicle - Flowering Currant

Ribes White Icicle is a rare, charming, gracefully shaped and rustic-looking spring bush. This Flowering Currant, very early, with large pendulous white clusters of sweet-smelling berry fragrance, and a lovely deciduous, tender green aromatic leaves, is of incomparable elegance. Even in shade, it's illuminated by its abundant immaculate flowering and very bright foliage. Extremely hardy, easy to grow and perfectly suited for beginner gardeners, this white Flowering Currant adapts well to any good, well-drained fresh garden soil and a sunny or semi-shaded exposure. This new variety is a true favourite that will fit wonderfully in many garden settings!

Ribes sanguineum, better known as the Flowering Currant, belongs to the Grossulariaceae family. It is native to the west coast of the United States. This bush is quite common in many gardens, for its graceful spring flowering in pendulous clusters, mostly pink. But this new variety, White Icicle, from Canada, is on the other hand, very rare. This cultivar forms a vigorous, globose-shaped bush, with branches branching out from the base, thus presenting a dense rounded and bushy tuft. The erect stems, a beautiful mahogany brown, arch nicely at their ends. With rapid growth, it easily reaches 2 to 3m (7 to 10ft) in height and width. Its deciduous foliage consists of tender green leaves with long petioles, lobed, finely toothed, rough, but downy on the reverse, measuring 4 to 5cm (2in) long. When these leaves are crushed, they give off delicious blackcurrant fragrances. In autumn, this foliage takes on superb copper-yellow colours. In March-April, while the leaves are just starting to appear, it is covered with a multitude of small pure white tubular flowers, grouped in pendulous and fragrant clusters. These racemes, larger than those of the species, measure 10 to 13cm (4 to 5in) long. This early and spectacular flowering, contrasting wonderfully with the almost bare reddish-brown branches, is followed, from summer to autumn, by small blue-black berries, which birds love.

The Ribes sanguineum White Icicle was awarded by the Royal Horticultural Society with a Garden Merit Award in 2002.

This white Flowering Currant, is extremely hardy, very easy and suitable for beginner gardeners, adapts well to any good garden soil, moist and not too chalky. It appreciates semi-shaded situations, even shade, but also tolerates full sun if the exposure is not scorching. Blooming early in spring, it can be planted without problems under the cover of large deciduous trees, the light and sun filtering through their branches during this season being sufficient to illuminate the shade with its immaculate flowering. Later on, its lovely tender green foliage will brighten up this shaded corner. Very floriferous and fast-growing, it is perfectly suited for landscape or countryside hedge cultivation, forming a perfumed floral screen. It can be associated with other varieties of Flowering Currant or other flowering hedge bushes for beautiful colour harmonies. It is of course also a welcome sight in the background of perennial beds; in isolated situations, planted alone or in groups; or even integrated into a grove of bushes. It blends beautifully with other early flowering trees and bushes as well as with spring bulbs.
This charming Flowering Currant with its graceful flowers will combine divinely with perennial plants, bulbs and bushes, either with immaculate flowers for a sublime white and green garden ambience, or with yellow and blue flowers for wonderfully invigorating spring scenes, or with pink flowers for a romantic garden.     
This white Flowering Currant is also well suited to pot cultivation on a terrace or balcony.
And finally, don't resist taking a few branches of White Icicle, with barely open flowers, to compose sumptuous spring bouquets, in combination with other branches like those of Forsythia, Japanese Quince, Kerria japonica, etc.