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.Over the 25-odd years of my life as a gardener I have planted thousands and thousands of trees (many, but by no means all of them, with my own hands), in many places, from Scotland to Cornwall. Some of those trees are 20 years old now and I confess that

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

called 'Morello Crown' on Gisela 5 dwarfing rootstock. It's smaller than the 'Colt' rootstock, so the tree should reach around six to eight feet after 10 years. The 'Crown' variety is a slightly larger strain than the usual morello cherry, it's the one

About six years ago we planted a number of fruit trees in the field close to the house. We had great expectations, some of which were fulfilled almost immediately, while others were slower in coming (literally) to fruition.This year, for the first

Last year we made a momentous decision. After many years of buying real Christmas trees to decorate our home over the festive period, we decided to buy a fake one.Previously we had endless scenarios like this:"Are you going to get the tree

A short while ago I was driving past Peckham Rye, when my eye was caught by a series of white halos on the grass under some of the trees. It looked as if several small snow storms had targeted some of the larger and more handsome specimens across

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

have a few containers at home. My container plants include an ancient clematis, which has had fantastically fluffy seed heads for the past few weeks, a lemon, safely tucked up in fleece for the winter, and a fig tree.The fig tree has happily spent

Strummer and the Mescaleros (from their 2001 album Global A Go-Go; watch the video).John Chapman was a hard-boiled and slightly mad frontiersman who travelled from Pennsylvania through to Ohio, ahead of mainstream settlers, planting apple seeds and creating

. Their root systems become inseparable. Very romantic. I engineered a similar occurrence here by planting three birch saplings together and then plaiting them: now, 12 years later, they have grown into one rather singular tree.If I might wander off in a new