Can you recommend me a small tree?

[steppemum]

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!

hmm, definitely need proper dwarf trees/shrub.

Any tree which says 4 m after 20 years is not going to work.

One of the fastigate cherries might work, as they will stay tall and thin.

A pair of these would just look beautiful.
Only problem is, they are £55 each.

I’ve never, ever regretted the money I’ve spent on getting the perfect plant. They’ll right outside your house, you’ll see them every single day of your life, at least twice a day. Don’t you want your heart to lift? You won’t be thinking, “That was £110!” But if you go cheaper, you might very well be thinking, “I wonder if those little apricot trees would have been better.”

Just get them. They’re exactly what you wanted. .

HasThisSoddingNameGoneToo

milliefiori Yes, the commonly available white berried species seems to be small and low growing in my experience, but the native rowan and varieties like "Joseph Rock" get quite large. Although "Joseph Rock" is useful in a small space because it's a very narrow tree, tall but only about 2m across.

Most crab apples I've seen, and the one I have are definitely not too big as is the medlar.

Medlar is really underrated. They have beautiful blossom, great shape, and funny little fruit in Autumn. They really need to be planted and enjoyed more.

hmm, looking for the flowering apricot on another site and it says it needs a moist site?
So who is right!
I'm happy to water plenty to start with, but it needs to be happy there long term
It seems pretty unusual and rare.

Chardonnay You're right about the medlar needing to be planted more - but it is too big for a 6m x 3m strip - especially as its growth tends to be rather spreading. Crab apples too will grow into actual trees, but they're more upright, so if it's OK for them to bush out at first floor level, that would be OK. But only one in that space. Two trees in a 6m length is too close.

Something that was over-planted in the 60s and 70s and consequently went out of fashion is the Amanogawa cherry - a fastigiate flowering cherry, growing vertically with only a couple of feet of spread. I think it may be due for a revival. Pink, unfortunately, but very pale.
www.primrose.co.uk/5ft-amanogawa-cherry-blossom-tree-pot-p-67772.html

Off the wall and probably not your ideal but I’m hankering after a pair of wisteria trees 🙂

It is really beautiful milliefiori, looks exactly like the photo in the plant specification bit.

OP - I never regret money on plants, never. I am sat here now by my French doors looking at my garden in the dark. £55 is nothing. A few bunches of flowers from the supermarket that will be soon forgotten.

PoohBear - I have an amazing glorious wisteria int he back garden. It covers a pagoda. It is old, thick twisted stem, beautiful twisted branches in winter, masses of flowers hanging down just above my head in spring and then the prettiest leaves that change colour as summer goes on, and provides a lovely shady roof.

A good wisteria is fab. I see it from my kitchen window too!

I should say that the planting bit is 6m wide, but there isn't a wall/boundary on either side, so it will really be almost 6m between the trees. Which is why I think 2 dwarf trees will fit.
I have to wait for dh to get back from a trip before I can make a final decision. We might go for a cherry grafted on. I've been having a look and I think that is the way to go, grafted on to a stem, which is what the apricot is too.

MereDint - that cherry is pretty.

The reaosn for no pink is that there are curtains visible throuhg the big window, and they have a lot of red in them. Whenever I ahve had pink plants they look awful with the red curtains behind. Pretty much any other colour is OK (well, purple probably would be similar to pink) but I think white looks best.

Most varieties are grafted - it's the quickest way to propagate, and it allows more robust growth (or less robust growth, in the case of a dwarfing rootstock). Usually the graft is just above ground level. It's why plants produce suckers which look different - roses produce suckers with the leaves of one of the wild rose species, for example. My limited experience with plants grafted higher up hasn't been good - if you've got a couple of feet of stem with the graft above that, it seems more likely to fail.

MereDint - but most small fruit trees are grafted onto dwarf stems several feet long?

We have a small cherry and small apple tree in the back garden, both grafted on small rootstock, but the grafts are higher up, at the top of the stem, below the point where it begins to branch.