I am going round and round in circles!
Our front garden is currently grey slate chips with one or two plants sticking through. It needs redoing. We are going to keep the slate chips, but as we need to redo the underlying black weed suppressing stuff, we are going to remove the current useless boring plants, and make two circular beds. We want a speciment tree/shrub in each bed, and then underplant with small bulbs, cyclamen, bedding plants in summer etc.
The space is not huge, it is about 3 metres from house to road, and about 6m wide, the beds will be about 1- 1.5 m diameter max, and sit at the front edge of the site. (there is a path between the beds and the house.
So I need two matching specimen shrubs or trees for the centre of each bed.
They cannot be too large as it is closeish to the house and we don't want to over shade the front windows.
must be:
-not pink (white flowers by preference)
-more than one season interest (eg flowers and autumn foliage)
-thin at the bottom, so single stem or mutiple stem with leaves higher up (we need to see past them to get off the drive, so not a thick bush)
-not globe /lollipop shape - my favourite shape would be like a birch tree, upright, delicate, slender and airy, not dense, solid canopy.
I started by looking at small trees, crab apples, amalanchier, Rowan etc, but I am afraid they are going to end up too big, and if I prune too much, they will loose shape.
Any suggestions?
Oh, forgot to say, site is dry, west facing, and exposed (full sun and a bit windy), so no shelter.
The perfect tree would be an acer, which needs shelter, wet and not full sun, so that's out!
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Can you recommend me a small tree?
38 replies
steppemum · 13/09/2019 11:28
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