I adore blooming trees. After a bleak winter they do so much to lift my spirits and add such beauty to the landscape that I really can’t get enough of them! We’ve added dogwoods, redbuds and cherries throughout our property, and I can’t wait until they grow bigger to make an impact in the landscape.
I also have a deep love for fruiting trees. Not only are the blooms beautiful but they also hold the promise of delicious fruit to enjoy later in the season. When my children were little, we loved reading the picture book, Each Peach Plum Pear by Janet and Allan Ahlberg. To this day, every time I go outside and enjoy the blooms I think of that rhyming book and it makes me smile remembering all the sweet and special times we had cuddled up reading together.
When I designed our garden, I knew that I wanted to include fruiting trees in our plan, not just for the beauty of them, but also as a practicality since we were putting up a deer fence around the garden. I ordered dwarf peach, plum, apple and cherry trees. Even though some varieties can be self pollinating, fruiting trees almost always do better with another variety to help with pollination so we planted two of each tree.
Each tree was a whip when we planted it (as a side note, looking at these pictures, I can’t believe how far the garden has come!).
I’ve been astonished at how fast the peach trees have grown and how big they’ve gotten. They are, perhaps, actually too big for the space!
Of the different types of trees we planted, the peaches have far outpaced everything else. We got fruit off of them the second year we had them. So far, we’ve gotten one singular cherry (that a bird promptly ate), one apple that had a happy worm living in it, one pear and zero plums. But dozens of delicious, beautiful peaches.
Last year, we were so disappointed that we got a very late freeze and therefore no peaches. We can barely wait for this years crop.
