Gardening 213
Every address every month
In Your Garden
Monthly gardening ideas & tasks by Andrew Staib of Glorious Gardens
Bringing height in to your garden Introducing new trees into a garden can fill people with trepidation. The wrong tree can outgrow its space, cast shade, or it can drop unwanted leaves. Its roots can undermine houses or it fails to survive due to soil or wind conditions. This article will help you choose the right tree for the right place. Given that most of our gardens are on the small to medium size I will concentrate on trees from 2 to 5 metres in height Photinia Trees must be chosen carefully. A well positioned tree with a delicate and spacious leaf and branch character can create a canopy that will give your garden a sense of height, enclosure, intimacy and privacy without dominating the garden. Proportion Choosing more than one new tree in your garden can give your garden a more glade like effect. They can soften the effect of neighbour’s houses and overlooking windows and actually make the garden feel bigger as a canopy immediately stimulates our memories of the countryside and different landscapes we have visited. If your garden is quite bare, planting trees normally means selecting more than one so that the ‘weight’ and ‘volume’ of them will balance each other. However if you have a large tree next door, you can factor this in as your own, and therefore all you need to do is balance this neighbour’s tree with one or two of your own. Evergreen Trees Small evergreen trees The more robust the evergreen presence you want, say for privacy, the more dense the leaf canopy needs to be. This can have the advantage of being perfect for screening but they will still cast shade and if you grown them near a fence careful that over time they won’t also block out your neighbours view or light. Also they
will want to protrude outwards as well as grow upwards so this has to be factored in. For a denser canopy of leaves, these are some of my favourites: Arbutus Uendo, Magnolia Little Gem, Ligustrum excelcium, Loquat and Photinia. Photinia is a common tree, normally kept as a hedge, but still a high performer with its electric red leaves. If you have acid soils you can go for the Rhododendrons and Camellias. More delicate evergreens are Olives, Pittisporum ‘Silver Queen’ and Viburnum tinus whilst Ceanothus can form an ‘umbrella’ like shape over a bed or path. Delicate small trees that lose their leaves Don’t forget you relax in your garden mainly in the warmer months so think hard before you buy an evergreen. They are less generous to wildlife normally, and will you really be needing their shade, privacy or dense green backdrop over the Winter months? For a more open canopy that lets dappled light through, you could think of Amelenchier lamarki, Weeping Birch, Weeping Cherry, Malus Red Sentinal, Sorbus Pink Pagoda (or the smaller Sorbus pseudovilmorinii), Cercis Forest Pansey (or the smaller green leaved Cercis Avondale). Albezia is a heavenly tree though it needs a lot of sun and a sheltered position.
