Thank you Garden for responding. Yes, I intend to take a picture of the whole bush and make a note of its dimensions when I visit my friend in a couple of weeks. When there last time in Feb. I was looking at many plants so my memory may not be perfect, but I remember the bush as being much wider than it's height of about four and a half feet and having many stems coming out of the ground and arching over. Because of the drought we've had the last two summers and being in too much shade most of the outer stems were dead. So actually it was not a 'large bush' as I stated above, but I had the impression that it would be much larger if in good soil rather than the dry sandy soil of my friend's garden, and had adequate sun. She brought me a couple of long stems to try and root and the stems had little bunches of foliage growing along them from which the flowers came. She said when in full bloom this spring the bush was one big pink fluff ball. The stems had thorns. I hope the pictures to come don't show my memory to be too far off ... LOL.

Yes, they use it as a street tree near where I live. I remember the kids up the court put the contents of the seed capsule in my letterbox so when I scraped around for the mail at the back of the box, I got a handful. The pic is indeed a dark and very attractive form.

I still think it was you but don't remember that much if kids were there. Wife black straight hair? Last Saturday at the Devonian gardens we talked about prunus Siberica and thought it to be a rather minor deviation of prunus Manchirica. Even though Siberica is likely to carry over the pink I still have one reserved thought that Robert Purvis knows of about Siberica. That it is an incredibly slow grower and is dwarf. Robert used to live in Alaska and in Idaho still does nothing but apricot in one of his collections in Washington. Gabe Botar was at the gardens who is another person knowing a great deal about apricot. He had scions of a prolific dwarf apricot with small good tasting fruits that he produced from crossed parents. Good stuff because slow growing and dwarf is always great for extreme cold or unprotected sites. For example flowering under the snow would delay bloom and escape the damaging spring frosts. If Clair Lammers (formerly from Edmonton) from Alaska ever grew Gabes apricot he would at least had fruits from this where all other his Manchurica experiments failed. My grandfather may have been around as a retired forester at the time those were planted and lived very close by. Only a remote possibility exists. I came across the trees a few years ago because I wanted to visit my childhood memories of the wading pool that still there in that place and not that anybody told me. Who ever planted them it seems very possible it was done from self pollinated Goldcot seeds similar the way you collected from the pink tree the seeds for another generation.

You're probably pretty similar if you're only a block off the water. The bottom of my garden is on the Sound. At times we have a 12 degree temperature difference from here to town, which is a 10 minute drive and only a couple miles at most from the water. We're cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter here. That and my east facing sheltered garden with the terrace walls that retain heat are why I estimate my garden to be zone 9.