Gardening
Two twenty-first birthday trees
Denis Wood
There will be time again in November and December before the year ends, for ceremonial planting of 10 ft. deciduous trees with aldermanic pomp and silver spades, but there are others which can be unostentatiously laid down, as it were like port, against twentyfirst birthdays. Those, for instance, which are always grown and sold in containers because, owing to their early development of coarse roots, they cannot be transplanted from the open ground at a size much above 3 rt. Enlightened parents might not themselves expect to see some of these trees in their full development but, by buying half a dozen or so now and transferring ,them every two or three years first into larger pots and then into increasingly larger tubs,. they should be able to give a fortunate child at his coming of age trees between
15 and 20 ft. high, ready for final planting and well on the way to maturity.
One of these could be Arbutus unedo, known also as the Killarney Strawberry Tree. It certainly grows wild in Ireland but is not admitted as a native by Clapham. Tutin and Warburg in their Excursion Flora of the British Isles.' It is unusual in being tolerant of lime, belonging as it does to the Ericaceae, a family which includes many calcifuges like rhododendrons, It is evergreen with oval, shiny leaves, the white flowers in drooping clusters making their appearance late in the year from October to December at which time the fruit from the previous year's flowers still hangs on the tree. This fruit resembles a strawberry in appearance, but although harmless to eat, has a disagreeable taste. If left alone it will often grow as a tall shrub with several stems, but it can be pruned to a single stem to give it a picturesque contorted branch structure and a spreading crown. It is in fact the shape of the tree, assisted though it may be by inspired pruning, which gives to it its peculiar charm. It is hardy in the South of England and, according to Bean in his 'Trees and Shrubs Hardy in the British Isles,' has withstood 300 of frost at Kew. In milder districts and sheltered aspects in the South and West, its cousin Arbutus menziesii, a real exotic from California, would be the one to choose, This is the beautiful Madrona, a larger tree with flowers, also white, in May in upright terminal panicles, followed by yellow pea-sized fruits and most notable for its beautiful warm cinnamon coloured bark.
Another tree which would make a superb twenty-first bithday present is the Judas Tree, Cercis siliquastrum, a native of South Europe and the Orient, but culti
vated here for more than three hundred years. Unlike the Arbutus, this is deciduous, but it has a somewhat similar type of growth needing poetic pruning to make it into a tree which in time will reach to 25 ft, — the largest tree at Kew is 40 ft. A good example is seen in the Oxford Botantic Gardens, now about 20ft. high with an outline which is truly picturesque as Uvedale Price would have understood the word. The many mauve pink pea-shaped flowers appear in May on old wood, even, as Bean points out, on the trunks of old trees. In fact, trees which are slowly dying produce the most flowers,
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