On trees

Trees to me appear to be one of the unsung heroes of gardening. They create a sense of time, place and history within the landscape. Having a house perched on a bare piece of ground creates a feeling of exposure, rawness and incompleteness. Place a largish tree nearby and suddenly the house belongs. Trees provide history, a course of events. They create a sense of belonging in the landscape. At the same time there is nothing worse than a tree that is misplanted; one that does not belong. We are all guilty of doing this. Finding a plant in a nursery that we love the look of, but failing to read the label. Do we really want a 60' giant in our small back garden - however good it looks when it is 6' high! I love eucalyptus trees (my time in Australia converted me to them) but they are singly inappropriate in most of our gardens. Thuggish root systems searching out all water sources they tend to drop their branches whenever they feel like it and grow at the rate of knots. Not only that they are highly inflammable. The Blue Mountains in Australia get their name from the haze that lies across them; bluish in colour it is created by the oils released from the eucalyptus trees and is highly inflammable - not a good tree to plant alongside houses with chimneys. In addition they do absolutely nothing for our wildlife. However, if you do plant one (and I have a very small one in my garden) you can keep it short with pruning and it can provide endless foliage for indoor flower arranging.

Big trees are in

I have just got back, exhausted, from Germany where we have been sourcing some mature 30 foot trees for one of large landscaping projects. Germany has long held a fantastic reputation for growing superb native European trees, and after this visit, we can see why. There were 57 hectares of beautifully-planted, pruned, turned and therefore symmetrical trees, including beech and hornbeam. Big trees are much in demand at the moment as they form arboricultural anchors for landscape schemes, and lend an immediate sense of longevity to the newest project. It is a joy, though, to see real expertise at work and we were privileged to be shown round these pinnacles of horticultural skill. The euro's strength against sterling may favour UK nurseries, but I fear we have a great deal to learn before we can rival Germany's pre-eminence in providing big trees.