MARCH/APRIL 2007
For an American, it was an astounding statement.
I had been reading an English book about garden design,* and there it was, the admonition that, when planting trees, they should be “grouped carefully...so whatever development occurs in the next two hundred years or so they are likely to be retained as being essential to the quality of the landscape.” I almost laughed out loud.
We live is a place where ten years can be considered a normal life expectancy for a street tree. Houses are torn down for rebuilds and the garden starts from scratch. Worry about framing scenic views or screening unsightly ones? The views themselves could disappear next year.
Although we Americans may be challenged in matters historical, we are generally quite good at getting value for our money. No doubt about it: trees are expensive, a reflection of the time it takes to bring them to market. Annuals? There’s a reason why they’re cheap. Start them in a greenhouse, and a few months later you sell them. Trees take years, and during that period someone is getting paid to water and fertilize and prune them. That labor is reflected in the price.
All the more reason therefore to think long and hard before selecting a tree for your garden and deciding where to put it. Put a daylily in the wrong place and you can move it in a jiffy. Not so easy with trees.
Spring is prime tree-planting time, and I hope you buy them the way we Chicagoans used to vote: early and often. But before you do, be sure to have a look at the article in this issue on tree planting mistakes, written by woody plant professional Linda Kiscellus. Camera in tow, she roamed the region for this story, documenting tree planting mistakes as she went along. The mistakes were sometimes aesthetic horrors—big shade trees cut in an L-shape so they would fit under power lines—and other times they were gaffs that will lead to the eventual death of the tree. And that means money.
In 1994, I visited Stourhead, an English landscape garden developed in the 18th century that was badly hit by a massive windstorm that had felled trees all across the south of the country a few years before. At the garden’s exit there was a sign: “We are planting for the next 200 years,” it read.
So when you buy a tree, think carefully before you buy. It’s your most expensive plant purchase, after all. And think about those next 200 years.
*The English Gardening School by Rosemary Alexander & Anthony du Gard Pasley
