Rich Pickings
For a specimen tree in the lawn, go for a mulberry or a quince – they make great shapes, with attractive foliage and spectacular fruit. Or you could make a small orchard with a mixture of fruiting species if the garden is big enough.
A fruiting hedge is traditional in country gardens so grow damsons and greengage trees up through a row of shrub roses or try a medlar, which has great autumn colour and strange, long-lasting fruit used for making preserves.
A south-facing wall is ideal for growing fan-trained cherries, pears, peaches and nectarines, which appreciate the extra warmth. The wall acts as a radiator and helps ripen the fruit, but keep the trees very well watered in summer. Protect ripening fruit from birds by dropping a net down over wall-trained fruit.
For a garden divider, go for espalier-trained apple trees trained on trellis that don’t mind sharing with clematis or climbers.
If you have an arch over a path, plant a cordon apple tree at each corner and train them up and over the top. Or plant espalier apples over a pergola to turn it into a fruiting tunnel.
Outline beds with step-over trees; the sort that have had their trunks trained out horizontally to make low-fruiting “rails”. These can produce an apple from every eight inches of trunk.