Gardening
David Wheeler
A friend aged 83, newly establishing herself in suburban sheltered housing, has been asked by the management to nominate a few small trees to plant in the block’s restricted grounds. In truth, Betty knows very little about such things, so she rang me for a few suggestions. She wanted a list of more than half a dozen different ornamentals that would grow ‘no larger than an apple tree’ and be pleasing (by which I took her to mean ‘clearly visible’) to old eyes.
Important matters had to be established quickly. Sun or shade? I asked. Damp or dry soil? Chalky or acidic? Evergreen or deciduous? Answers were somewhat vague but her call nevertheless gave me the opportunity to list my own personal ‘desert island’ choices. I pondered. Which eight small trees would I find difficult to renounce should I ever be uprooted, screaming, from my idyllic broad acres on the border between England and Wales where, since the millennium, I’ve planted more than a thousand arboreal and shrubby desirables?
Evergreens were eventually ruled out as Betty said her fellow residents thought them too cemetery-like (not true – but in those surroundings…) and likely (correct) to cast permanent shade and obscure a favoured view.
I had no trouble making a selection. In no particular order of preference it consisted of the supreme Japanese maple, Acer palmatum ‘Osakazuki’ (I have more than a dozen of them scattered around my own garden), a famous cultivar that’s been with us since the late-19th century, celebrated for its intense crimson leaves in autumn.
I hesitated slightly over my choice of a flowering cherry – it all depends, I said to Betty, on the desired blossom colour, as they are available in all hues from snow white through knicker-pink to puce. If in doubt, though, go for ‘Taihaku’, the Great White, with its glorious springtime abundance of single white flowers emerging from magnificent coppercoloured foliage that gradually turns green through summer months before burnishing itself with joyous bronzy tints in October.
Cornus ‘Eddie’s White Wonder’ performs an even better autumn trick, but the flowers (bracts, actually) are up to four inches wide, suggesting in May that a flock of lost snow buntings has settled on its branches.
When it comes to the sorbus clan we’re spoilt for choice. These cousins of our mountain ash are profuse, with conspicuous and sometimes long-lasting bunches of berries in yellow, amber, white, marbled pink and sealing-wax red. The variety ‘Olympic Flame’ has flamboyant autumn leaf colours and a columnar habit that demands little ground space.
My hawthorn choice might just be our own native quickthorn, Crataegus monogyna, bearing good spring blossom remembered from childhood and enough bright berries to sustain a winter-starved avian population.
The ginkgo is indeed special and on a recent visit to Kew I met some newly introduced varieties that are somewhere between a shrub and a small tree. It’s an ancient survivor, known from fossil remains to have existed more than 200 million years ago. It’s bombproof, too, literally: in Hiroshima a ginkgo survived the blast of the first atomic bomb on 6th August 1945, when almost all else around it perished.
My indispensable magnolia is the delicate-looking but tough-as-old-boots M stellata, spangled with white or pale pink starlike flowers on naked branches before the leaves emerge.
And as Betty had said ‘no larger than an apple tree’, I’d include a superior dessert apple variety – no scrumping, dears – for both blossom and fruit. Try Ashmead’s Kernel, a russet type, delicious with the Christmas remains of that cheddar truckle.