My friend Rolf inquires from Germany:
I planted three fruit trees about four years ago and all of them have become misshapen: the apple tree has become enormously tall, the plum tree totally misshapen by a huge number of branches, the cherry tree also goes up but not wide.
Help!
If you have any good websites on gardening advice, please let me know.
Good questions! My wife being the botanist in our family, I appealed to her for some advice for you:
Well, there's the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. But what I do when I need to find some info is a Google search on my problem and I usually find something helpful. For example, when I wanted to know what trees would survive in clay soil, I did a search on "trees for clay soil" or something like that. I found a University of Minnesota site that had done a very thorough report on the subject. It had recommendations for trees that would grow in clay soil and also for planting the tree. (That's how we ended up with some of the trees we have.) But you need to be able to recognize the kind of soil you have or take it to someone who can tell you.
I guess it's a matter of figuring out your question. Rolf's problems with his fruit trees might go back to selection. He might not have chosen an appropriate tree for the amount of sun and other conditions. Or he may have selected varieties that just grow the way his trees are growing. I recommend that he learn all he can about the varieties he has, then search for info on pruning. Pruning is not that simple. You have to figure out what you want to achieve. Do you want to maximize fruit production? Or are you after appearance?
Gardening is all about figuring out what you want to achieve and what kind of soil and how much sun you have. Also how much water, time, and money. If you've got enough money, you can just hire someone to help you do the figuring out and everything else. But where's the fun in that?
Later, my wife overheard me listening to Frank Harris's My Life and Loves and suggested—almost as quickly as it occurred to me—that I also share the following passage with Rolf:
Europe has learned what natural beauty is from English tourists. Was not Ruskin [John Ruskin, 1819-1900] the first to assert that French trees were far more beautiful than English trees? He did not give the reason, but I may. England is afflicted with a wind from the southwest that blows three hundred odd days each year. Against this attack all trees when young have to stem themselves or they would be uprooted; as it is, they are dwarfed and crooked. And the woodlands of France suffer from the same plague, though much less severely. There are no forests in the world to be compared with the American: in half an hour's drive out of New York up the Hudson one sees more varieties of exquisite and well grown trees than one can find in all France, or even Germany. [p. 371]
Thanks for your and your wife's help.
ReplyDeleteI'll be checking out the Brooklyn Gardening site.
Last year in the Rosenheim community center I paid to hear a Bavarian tree guru lecture about pruning trees and heard a sermon on the search for harmony in life, fascinating the other fifty-nine retirees with the message, but his curious theatre interested me more. Every form of a tree or of branch(es) was a metaphor about life as we live it. And only if you were in good mental shape and knew a tree's essence would you be able to correctly trim it.
A nice example of some of the local greens who are over the top and need a trimming.
After the lecture I showed him a picture of our prune tree. He was puzzled and refused to say a word. I think the idea was that I should sign up for a half-year course on pruning.
I was pissed: here was a supposed expert on pruning and I had a pruning problem with a real prune tree—a prune-squared question, so-to-say—but got no answer.
I have avoided getting anonymous advice from the internet after the disaster with my so-called mock-orange bushes, which I planted four years ago. The idea was to replicate the atmosphere of spring and early summer on my porch in Kitchener, Waterloo, where mock-orange bushes surrounded the porch, spicing our breakfasts with the fragrance of blooming lemon trees—just like we have experienced in Tuscan springs in Fiesole in the Pensione Bencista, on a hill over Florence.
Mock-orange is in the family of Philadelphus coronarius, or Bauernjasmin, farmer's Jasmin, what they mis-call it here. However, the websites four years ago did not clue me in to the fact that 99.9% of mock-orange bushes sold in Germany have absolutely no fragrance at all.
This year I was blessed(?) with wonderfully blooming, but non-fragrant mock-orange bushes along one side of our terrace, mocking our memories of Fiesole and Kitchener. A mock-square business, so to speak. Thank God the roses did really well. We were enfolded by clouds of sweet-bitter fragrance, sitting on the terrace, drinking Darjeeling tea.
By now the rains have wiped out all blooms except the newly blooming butterfly bush out front (Buddleia davidii), which has attracted huge colonies of butterflies with their luxurious fragrance.
Now is the season of the blooming Linden trees in Germany. The nearby streets are lined partly with chestnut trees, which have been in luxurious bloom this May to mid-June providing a great setting for beer gardens, and with Linden trees, surrounding walkers and joggers with their sweet fragrance from mid-June to mid-July. In Muenster, Westfalen, our previous German residence and place of work, the city walls and ramparts were razed in the late 18th century. Now the former ramparts are a city park, planted with Linden trees. At this time of the year joggers and cyclists curve around the city, sweaty and bathed in Linden fragrance. A great place to jog. It is 4.5 kilometer long.
On Munich beer gardens, especially the one at Chinesischer Turm, see.
The nice thing about middle to northern Europe is the incredible length of spring, starting from February in Britain. Near Cambridge there is Anglesey Abbey with huge fields of wild snow drops. The Times of London and The Guardian have headlines every year on the beginning of spring, which is identified by the blooming of those fields. This year was a severe winter, the snow drops started to bloom two weeks late, at the end of January!
But enough of the fragrance of flowers, when I really pine for the fragrance of a Romeo y Julieta cigar on a hot, sunny, humid, and wind-less day on the terrace—when the winds and rain finally give me a break.