Viburnum tinus 'Anvi' SPIRIT laurustinus

Viburnum

The genus Viburnum includes around 150 species distributed across the temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere, from eastern Asia through the Caucasus and Europe to North and South America. Botanically, it is an exceptionally diverse group: it comprises both deciduous and evergreen shrubs, species with strongly fragrant flowers as well as those with only a faint scent or none at all, and others grown primarily for their (inedible) fruit. This diversity is reflected in common horticultural practice and several informal groups – the fragrant winter viburnums (V. farreri and V. × bodnantense), the fruiting viburnums (V. opulus, V. trilobum), the evergreen Asian viburnums (V. davidii, V. tinus, V. cinnamomifolium), the large-leaved ornamental viburnums (V. plicatum, V. japonicum), and many more, including hybrids that combine traits from several groups. The genus has been known since antiquity, and its Latin name Viburnum appears in the works of Roman authors around the turn of the era, such as Virgil and Pliny the Elder. 

Laurustinus, Viburnum tinus, originates from the Mediterranean, both from its Eurasian coastline stretching from the Pyrenees to Turkey and from the northern parts of Africa, where it grows in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya. It is also native to the nearby islands, from the Canary Islands to the Balearics. It is admired for its striking metallic blue fruits, which are a botanical curiosity. Their colour is not produced by pigment but by structural colouration, created by light refracting on microscopic lipid globules. The species name tinus comes directly from antiquity, where it was used exclusively for this evergreen shrub. Pliny the Elder mentions it in his Naturalis Historia as a plant commonly grown near dwellings, making it one of the oldest documented ornamental shrubs of the Mediterranean. Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) formally described the species in 1753, although its cultural and botanical history is far older. In the wild it is most often found in maquis, the evergreen shrublands of the Mediterranean with poor soils, arid summers and intense heat, as well as on the moister lower slopes of hills. In these habitats it combines two seemingly contradictory traits: resilience to summer drought and a need for winter moisture. Unlike many other plants typical of such locations, it is neither spiny nor defensive in any other way and brings a sense of freshness even where little else survives.