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Over the past few weeks we have been wrapped up in a flurry of tree planting. It is the very tail end of the planting season and, as I am mostly pretty disorganised, things that should have been done earlier in the season are being done now

there and for that one night Aynho became the capital of Royalist England. The second is that many of the houses along the main street have thriving apricot trees trained against their walls*.Apparently this is a practice that has been going on for hundreds of years

The woods around us consist mostly of ash trees (Fraxinus excelsior), and every autumn we have a few weekends of frantic leaf collecting (particularly frantic around the chicken run). The trees seem to shed leaves at random – one tree

this tree will have two sorts of berries: blue-black sloes and deep red haws.It is an example of a 'husband and wife tree'. This is quite a well-documented phenomenon, which can occur when trees are planted as whips, very close together, and grow up entwined

of our trees find themselves right now. Trees in bud.I thought of it after my wife pointed out how extraordinary the buds of the ash tree looked. She is right that they are initially charcoal grey and then open into strange purplish flowers like miniature

We are getting very close to the end of the bare-root planting season. This is your last chance to plant trees and hedges, which have been dug out of the ground (as opposed to their cossetted cousins that are pot grown).This also means that it is a

Over the years I've planted dozens of fruit trees, and while some have been productive, carrying delicious crops, others have been very disappointing. So, why the disappointment? It's usually because I've chosen a new variety without having tasted

I've always loved horse chestnut trees and fondly remember a specimen near the house where I grew up. It was massive: beautiful in spring, lush and green in summer and a plentiful source of much-coveted conkers in autumn. Eventually it was deemed

This time of year the crab apples are at their most impressive: the trees are laden with little yellow or red apples that hang on until long after the last leaves have fallen. These are really useful smallish trees, not just for their colourful

The other day there was a tweet* from Gardeners' World regarding a post I wrote on this blog a couple of years ago, about my top five trees for small gardens.While I still stick with those five I thought I might try and add a further five just