We’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating – we love trees 
and a month ago we planted 25 new trees in our back garden! They have become our new ‘babies’ as they currently need a lot of attention (have to be watered every day it doesn’t rain for the first year!) but it’s great to have something to nurture! From the house most look more like twigs at the moment, but in a few years time they should look fantastic! We have quite a variety and they have all been planted as per our garden design so we have lots of different leaf colours, flowers, berries, shapes, bark etc. This is only about half the trees planned for the garden but this was all we could afford at the moment – we will wait until next season to plant some more.
We did order a few ‘medium’ trees which came from Barchams which are between 2.0-3.5 metres tall but most were garden centre trees which are around 1.5 metres and less than £30 each. We had some help to plant them as the big ones needed the holes to be dug with a mini-digger. They are all staked as it is incredibly exposed and can get extremely windy here, and already we have had to put an additional stake on some of the trees to ensure they don’t rock around too much!
It makes a real difference having some trees in what was before just a big open space – gives some shape and form and character, and suddenly it feels more like a garden than a field! Some of our trees include:
- Holm Oak (evergreen oak)
- Walnut Tree
- Prunus – flowering cherries, 1 white and 1 pink
- Betula utilis var. jaquemontii – white stemmed birches
- 1 each of the evergreens: cyprus, juniper, picea, cedar
- Larch – deciduous, soft ‘fir’ tree
- Liquidambar and Acer Crimson King – lovely Autumn colour
- Acer platanoides drummondii – variegated maple
Now we have to water them every day we have noticed just how dry the last month has been; there have only been 4 days when we haven’t watered them (and one of them we were at a wedding!)! The logistics of watering them has been interesting but we have managed by buying several more hoses and joining them together with a break half way along. We now have 160m of hose which gets more or less to the back of the garden! Fortunately our mains water pressure is so good that there isn’t a problem with getting a decent water flow that far away from the house. I have personally got watering the trees down to about 20 mins and it’s quite nice to stick my mp3 player on and have a wander amongst them in the early evening! Our water bill is going to be high though …
