Choosing Trees

Create a balance
Trees surrounding a country garden, give shelter and privacy. Choose your forms and colours with great care, mix evergreens and deciduous to give your garden balance.

Planting Trees
When you buy young trees you may need to support them, as they may bend out of shape in wind. Hammer a stake into the base of the planting hole before putting the tree in and tie the tree to your stake (avoid the roots!). When you come to fill the hole look for the soil mark on the base of the trunk and plant at the same depth as it was before transplanting.

Hedging
We all plant for screening or hedging at some point in the garden. Fast growing, upright trees are useful for the former, and those with a dense, twiggy habit are ideal. Try to be patient when planting for hedging purposes, we can be impatient and go for fast growing poplars or Leyland Cypress. Both of these can grow rapidly and take over the garden, shading your garden and your neighbours, robbing your other plants of moisture, nutrients and light! Therefore, you should be patient and stick to less agressive, slower growing alternatives. Hedges are often a useful backdrop against which borders and groups of containers can be displayed.

Yew (Taxus baccata) is slow growing but is ideal for sheltering other plants as it forms a thick, impenetrable hedge that does not require a huge amount of attention.

Trees and Shrubs for colour!
Trees that flower are very popular and understandly so - cherries and plums are amongst the most widely planted. Ornamental apples (Malus spp) and rowans and white beams (Sorbus spp) are well adored too - they have a dual season and flower in Spring and Autumn. Autumn colour is a good basis on which to select trees; after all, at its best it can rival flowers for sheer impact. You will do well to remember that good autumn colour largely depends on there being sharp frosts at the right time in autumn, so areas with mild climates rarely see a good show of colour. Many of the best trees are large but you can get smaller ones, such as Bonzai, Amelanchiers and several shrubs, like Euonymus alatus and species of rhus.

Foliage Colour:
For dramatic colour in autumn, Japanese maples are hard to beat, they have a beautiful filigree leaves which turn from tones of scarlett to burnt orange - lush!

Choosing your garden plants

Plants for dry sun
Many grasses like dry, sunny conditions. Big, clump forming Miscanthus sinesis 'Variegatus' is a handsome architectural plant for a dry border.

Any garden benefits from having a good mixture of plants, both in terms of height and shape, and in the variety of foliage and flower form and colour. However, it is surprising how much diversity and interest you can create without flower colour.

Plants for shady parts of the garden will inevitably major on leaf form and shape; plants for full sun will have more flower power. Make sure that you choose those that do well for these differing situations, and look, too, at the soil conditions. Some plants prefer acid soil, others alkaline.

Rhododendrons and azaleas, for example, refuse to grow on alkaline soil but will quickly provide useful ground cover for large gardens on peaty soil.

Hopefully, the differing habitats in your garden will allow you to choose a variety of plants from dry-loving to damp-loving, sun-loving to shade-loving.