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]
