National Tree Week 2013 has come and gone. It ran from 23rd November to 1st December. Early winter is the classic season for planting trees: as the saying goes, plant a tree before Christmas and ask it to grow, plant it after and beg it. I hope their campaign stimulated some people to plant trees who might not have otherwise, though nowadays so many enterprises have laid claim to weeks or days that I quite regularly discover that it was potato week, or take your mother to work day, or some such, and I missed it. There is probably an ingrowing toenails awareness month if you look hard enough.
My eye fell today on a beautiful tree I should dearly have liked to plant, called Malus trilobata 'Guardsman'. As is often the way with plants, part of the clue is in the name. It has three lobed leaves, quite unlike most apples, which at this time of the year go a wonderful, rich shade of red. They are fairly large, as apple leaves go, and at a casual glance you could almost mistake it for a liquidambar. I checked the anticipated ultimate height and spread on the label, and it only grows to around fifteen feet by six. Aha, 'Guardsman'. It is a narrow little tree. How extremely sensible and useful for modern gardens, which seem to get smaller year by year, especially as it is by all accounts a fairly slow grower.
It doesn't flower until June, late for an apple. I thought Malus hupehensis was one of the last, and that comes in about the second week of May (and has the scent of daffodils). The fruit are apparently small and green, good for wildlife but not showy, by the sound of it. Oh well, nobody's perfect. It will take sun or light shade, which further increases its usefulness in a garden setting, since what with other trees, and buildings, plants that will tolerate light shade rather than insisting on day-long exposure to the sun are handy.
Alas, I don't have room for another tree, even a small one. I have already killed poor 'Professor Sprenger' asking him to live in the nasty end of the long bed, which contains the most arid tract of soil in the entire garden. I don't know quite what is wrong with that soil, and whether it is just one of those veins of burning gravel the Victorian farm valuer identified, or whether back in its apple orchard days it suffered a catastrophic weedkiller spillage. Whatever the cause, my careful site preparation and subsequent diligent watering and feeding were not enough to save the Professor. Attempting to grow a tree in that spot was a last ditch effort to shoehorn another in, and there is simply nowhere for Malus trilobata 'Guardsman' to go.
That applies equally to Sorbus scalaris, with its fabulous divided leaves that make me think of prehistoric landscapes with dinosaurs wandering through them, and the lovely S. 'Copper Kettle'. I saw 'Copper Kettle' at Hergest Croft in 2007. I can be sure of the date, because it was the week of the run on Northern Rock, and the beginning of the banking crisis (or at least, the American system had been looking pretty hairy for a while, for those who worried about credit default swaps, but it was the start of the banking crisis visibly hitting the UK). To see was to desire. 'Copper Kettle' has amber fruits, and is incredibly pretty. And again, it doesn't grow too big. But I definitely don't have room for any Sorbus, in fact they would be even more impossible to squeeze in than another Malus, since they require full sun, which rules out the edge of the wood, and not too dry soil, which rules out most of the garden.
The news on the home front when I got back was mildly disappointing, in that an electrical problem we thought we had tracked to source has opened up again. Over the weekend, something was repeatedly tripping the main switch by the fusebox. The Systems Administrator narrowed it down to one of the ring mains, which has a small but eclectic collection of lights and sockets on it. Unplugging the electric fire in the bedroom seemed to have done the trick, and allowed us to keep the rest of the circuit on, but this afternoon it started tripping everything out again, even without the fire. Tomorrow the SA will have to play the game of disconnecting everything in turn on that circuit, which should in theory identify the culprit if it is an appliance. Of course, it could be a fault in the house wiring. I have given up resetting the clocks on anything except my alarm clock, while making a note to self to get one with a back-up battery plus the ability to reset the clock automatically when the power comes back on. It's a reminder that the house, like us, is getting to that age where things can suddenly and randomly go wrong.
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