A FEW NEW TREES

Don't forget this is the week of all my favorite giveaways. Click here to for the soil knife giveaway and here for the Perfect Garden Hose.

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I garden in cycles. Every couple years, I create a new garden area (i.e. last year I redid the back yard), which is a ton of work, and then the next year I think to myself, "Oh I'll just do maintenance this year." What really ends up happening is that I just seem to buy with somewhat reckless abandon because I don't have a specific plan or "budget" (that word is always in quotes when it relates to my garden) to guide me.

From afar, the columnar apple looks like a big stick, but up close there are signs of life to come.

In addition to the ridiculous number of dahlias I bought over winter, many of which are currently in pots in my house as I wait for them to sprout, I also went a little tree crazy at the nursery a couple weekends ago. I brought home one tree that fit in my car: a columnar apple. This replaces a sickly 'Fine Line' Buckthorn that suffered the fate of living in shade for too long and it just couldn't recuperate. By the way, I love the idea of planting small fruit trees right in the middle of an ornamental garden because I think they are beautiful. An apple blossom might be the most romantic flower in the world.

That's what the fringe tree looked like when we planted it back in 2011.

And here it is now in it's new location, looking quite shrimpy with the big beech in the background.

The fringe tree off the deck has been moved. It can't say I didn't warn it. Because I did. Of all the small trees in our yard, that one takes center stage because of its proximity to the deck and prominence in the back yard. I planted it four years ago and I feel like I've been more than a little patient with it. Sure, it's grown a little, but it's still sort of spindly. Worse, it gives me approximately two lame flowers a year and I've not seen any sign of that number getting larger over the years. Sorry, fringe tree, you're going to have to put on a better show than that if you want that coveted spot.

Yes, part of this is my impatience coming through, but more and more, I just don't have a lot of hope for this tree. But it's not the end of the road for the fringe tree. He (or she, and that may be part of the problem as far as the flowering goes) has been moved to a lovely little spot by the creek, which is actually sunny now, thanks to the removal of a couple of very large trees last year.

With luck, we will see a few flowers on 'Ann' this year.

In its place is Ann. Magnolia 'Ann,' that is. She's part of the "Little Girl" series of magnolias that stay quite compact but put on the kind of show you'd expect from a magnolia. They do tend to be a little shrubby, which is not what I'm looking for in that spot, but I was able to find a tree-form 'Ann' that will allow the canopy to hover a few feet off the ground. Truth be told, I really wanted 'Jane,' which has pink blossoms that open to white, but it wasn't available in the tree form and I felt that was more important.

It's sort of fugly, but perhaps 'Ann' will grow into herself. The green stake was temporarily holding the clematis that had been growing up the fringe tree. I had to carefully untangle it from the fringe tree and temporarily tied it to the stake and then reattach it to the new magnolia.

I will admit, when I got this tree home I wondered what I was thinking when I chose it (honestly, I was exhausted and they only had two left to choose from). It doesn't have great shape (it has almost no branches on one side), but once you've borrowed a truck to drag a tree home via a one-hour drive, you're pretty much planting that sucker. Four years from now we might be in the same place, but for now I'm giving it a chance and hoping for the best.

We also added a crabapple, again in the newly sunny area made possible by the removal of diseased or damaged trees last year. Not only will it offer some additional screening from our neighbors to the north, it will be a perfect focal point from our living room window.

To be honest, crabapples scare me a little. Is there any other tree more well-known for its disease problems? And for every gorgeous crabapple I've seen, I can think of two that look terrible and are badly in need of a restorative pruning. I started my search for the right tree by looking for disease resistance and size. I also didn't want one that would get too horizontal.

It looks like very little so far, but hopefully it will become a star in the yard.

I'm fortunate to have an excellent tree nursery near me that has great information online. In their plant reference guide they have a chart on crabapples and I used it to narrow down my choices to two: 'Coralburst' and 'Royal Raindrops,' both of which have excellent disease resistance. Ultimately we went with 'Coralburst' just because we liked the flower color better.

All of the trees are planted and none of them look like anything yet because they've yet to flower or leaf out, which is why the pictures (admittedly hastily taken early in the morning), but I'm hoping the early-season move will ultimately be beneficial to them by shocking them less by the move.

And it's nice to have it done. It's always fun to get a tree, but planting a tree is a chore.

OFFICIALLY ON NOTICE

This is the time of year when I start taking stock of garden with a long-term view. In general terms, it's easy to spot areas that need attention and improvement. In some cases, though, it's identifying plants that I need to take a hard look at.

And I am officially putting two pretty important plants on notice. It's time to shape up or get shipped out.

The first, I'm very sad to say, is the fringe tree (Chionanthus virginicus) in the little terraced garden off the deck. (See a schematic view of what gardens are where here.) I planted it as the centerpiece of that garden in 2011, so this should have been its "leap" year (plants are said to "sleep" the first year, "creep" the second year and "leap" the third year), but it has done anything but come into its own. It's trunk is still quite skinny, showing very little growth since we planted it. It has gained some height and width but it's very odd how the leaves are sort of clustered at the ends of the branches. I've counteracted that problem by allowing a clematis to grow up it, which helps quite a bit, but it still looks sparse to me.

I fell in love with the idea of a fringe tree because my mom has a beautiful one that is gorgeous and dense and absolutely laden with flowers. Of course hers is much older than mine but neither of us remembers hers ever being so sparse. And worse yet, the flower situation was horrible this year.  I think there were maybe two flowers on it. There is a chance I may have a female plants while my mom has a male plant as the flowers are showier on a male. Female plants will eventually produce fruit as well, but I've seen no sign of that.

I do like the large leaves of the fringe tree and its bright yellow fall foliage, but given that it is one of the last trees to leaf out in spring and the flowers have been disappointing, the cons are currently outweighing the pros.

Given that trees are expensive and slow growing, I'm inclined to just hang in there with the fringe tree for one more year, but if the perfect replacement tree pops up, you never know, the fringe tree may have to go. In either case, it's definitely put up or shut up time for the fringe tree.

The second plant that I'm putting on notice that it might be on its way out, is there through no fault of its own. I'm speaking of the 'Cancan' climbing rose on the front of the house. Despite a beautiful display of flowers in late spring or early summer (and a few repeat blooms right now), every year this plant is absolutely eaten alive. In previous years aphids have been the problem. Earlier this year I found a sawfly larvae infestation on it. I thought I had it handled, but the leaves are now skeletons. Its shabby foliage looks absolutely horrid.

I don't think there's anything wrong with this climber. And in many ways, it's a good location for a rose: southern exposure, next to the house, nice and warm in the winter, etc. But this garden is a tiny strip of soil maybe 3 feet wide between the house and the patio. Rain doesn't reach it much and I don't really know how deep the soil there is.

I was better about watering there this year than I have been in the past and I really was babying the rose. It's my belief that insects are opportunistic and usually prey upon plants that are compromised in some way.

This year, when the nearby window box was full of orange flowers, I realized that the bright magenta blooms of 'Cancan' don't look so great with a lot of color combinations I tend to plan in the window box.

So I'm starting to think that maybe I need to look for another climber for that location. I'd love for it to be a rose, but that may be a fool's errand given Cancan's fate. Whatever goes there, I think I need to do a thorough job of amending that soil heavily and see if that helps plants stay healthy.

I wish plants read blogs. Maybe these two would shape up if they knew that I'm deciding their fate.