A tree is for life, so choose carefully what to plant

From November onwards, tree planting fits well into gardeners’ schedules. When trees in open ground finally lose their leaves, suppliers can move them safely. Trees in big pots also transplant well when the weather is cooler and the soil is damp. Think of Chekhov, that master of the short story: “In his work”, writes Donald Rayfield, an expert on it, “not to have planted a tree becomes nearly as great a sin as having chopped one down.”

Tree planting is decked now in virtue. In 2020, as lockdowns loomed, carbon capture was the buzz of the year. Councils proclaimed the thousands of trees they were planting. Britain was being sketched as a forested landscape of the future. Save the planet, plant a sapling. My first walks during the weeks of social confinement were through hundreds of young trees planted in plastic sleeves a foot or so apart.

First lockdown was a time of heavenly sunshine but no rain. In 2020 and in dry 2022 many newly planted saplings died from drought. Target numbers sound good but they do not translate into trees. I have watched the jobbing workers who jam them in: planters need to know how to do so.

Like a dog, a tree is not just for Christmas: it is for life. The choice needs thought. My expert guide is The Hillier Manual of Trees and Shrubs, updated in its 2019 paperback edition and available online for £17.59. This volume has guided me for 50 years, and its contents evolve as choices increase. The current editors are John Hillier and Roy Lancaster, as expert as anyone could wish. If I need a quicker prompt for more usual trees, I turn to Notcutts nursery in Suffolk and their lists of plants suitable for particular sites, either in their old printed catalogues or online, with filters to guide or confuse us.

For the choice of a single tree in a garden I also recommend Alan Titchmarsh’s How To Garden: Small Trees, published in paperback by the BBC in the days when the finest of garden presenters was king of their gardening coverage. Less than 100 pages long, it is available online for £10.95.

Kew is now entering this market. Its newly published Essential Tree Selection Guide is not a book to be taken handily into the garden (Filbert Press; £50; 528 pages). It is many times heavier than the Hillier manual. “I am passionate about trees and enjoy planting them in my garden,” writes Dame Judi Dench in a solicited quote which is printed as an “editorial review”. “This book will certainly help anyone choose a suitable species for their gardens”. Is the great lady right?

The guide, like Julius Caesar’s Gaul, has three parts. One is on “The Hidden Benefit of Trees”, exploring “ecosystem services”. One is entitled “Think Like A Tree”, which is philosophically impossible as trees cannot think. The third is an A-Z Tree Directory, likely to be the most used part. Colour photos, usually of individual specimens, represent many of the trees selected. They are excellent and justify the text’s comments that this or that tree is neglected, whether Tetradium, the bee-bee tree, or white-flowered Maackia amurensis, “ideal for adding an unusual touch to gardens”.     

The book has two main authors, Henrik Sjöman, a scientific curator at the excellent Gothenburg Botanical Garden in Sweden, and Arit Anderson, a garden designer and journalist with a keen interest in climate change. She won a gold medal at the RHS Hampton Court Flower Show in 2016.

I marvel at the agglutinated English of their book’s first two parts. Here is an example, close to this newspaper’s heart: “Swap stocks and shares for a tree’s investment in leaf structure, bark and roots and the precarious balance of nature’s stock exchange, when it comes to the profit and loss of a mature tree, became vividly apparent.” If you can understand this much, it is part, I fear, of the “growth economy”. Metaphors and verbosity loom large, led by “fractal dynamics” and “ecotones”.

Underneath lies a deeper problem. Throughout, the authors assume that conditions in a tree’s natural habitat govern the conditions which it will need to succeed in a garden. In some ways, yes, but in others, which they do not address, interestingly, no. There is not a total overlap, as years of gardening and observing have taught me. When they discuss the lovely Swamp Cypress, or taxodium, they assume it will only thrive in damp soil near water, as it usually does in the wild. It develops a broad base to its trunk there, as they well illustrate, but I know superb Swamp Cypresses in cultivation which are not near water at all.

Amazingly, there is not a word about the winter-flowering cherry, my top tree for gardens. A sort of cancel-horticulture pervades the text

Or again, they assume that the lovely pocket handkerchief tree, or davidia, must have damp, nutrient-rich soil, but every night I drive home from a 60-year-old specimen growing to a fine height and flowering freely, though rooted in alkaline soil, unenriched, beside a raised asphalt surface for car parking. Acid or alkaline soil and hardiness (on which the authors are unhelpfully vague) usually transfer from nature to gardens, but other aspects do not. The Hillier manual is more helpful, as it omits the eco-blurb and tells what suits trees in British cultivation.

As for “ecosystem benefits”, I gather that they divide into “supporting, provisioning, cultural and regulating”. I like to see trees’ outline through an autumn mist, but not through a fog of verbose platitudes and diagrams. One eco-systemic benefit for old people, apparently, is that “being outside in nature helps us to maintain good personal mobility which can result in fewer falls” (my garden is the one place where I fall over).

For infants, “pregnant women with more trees and green environments close to their homes typically have children with a healthier birth weight”. One study has proposed this tentative theory for northern Europe, but it cannot be globally valid. Does Saudi Arabia have a high proportion of smaller babies? What about babies on the tundra in the treeless high Arctic? They looked strapping enough to me, when fixed against the skin of their mothers’ backs, while I spent months in their villages.

So far from being “essential”, the guide is misleading. It recommends yellow-leaved Robinia Frisia although bacteria and fungus have wiped it out in much of Britain. It recommends larch trees without even hinting that larches have been felled systematically in many areas to halt lethal phytophthora which thrives round larches’ roots and then spreads. It never hints at fire blight’s propensity to infect Sorbus Joseph Rock, another killer.

The guide is also selective. It says nothing about Alnus cordata’s spring catkins, nothing about the popular white-barked birch, Betula jacquemontii, and nothing about holm oaks, Quercus ilex. Amazingly, there is not a word about the winter-flowering cherry, my top tree for gardens which has given FT readers months of pleasure. A sort of cancel-horticulture pervades the text: nothing on trees which I and many of you love, such as white-flowered pterostyrax, lovely Malus transitoria, lovely heptacodium, Sorbus hupehensis or Sorbus vilmorinii.

If it leaves you worrying that your baby may be born too small, come and walk round my garden and enjoy the ecosystem benefits of these and other familiar trees. Meanwhile, make the Hillier manual your first resort for tree-parenting.   

Robin Lane Fox will give the National Garden Scheme’s annual lecture, on “What garden visiting does for us”, on Thursday November 23. Tickets are available for either the live or live-streamed event. All information and bookings at www.ngs.org.uk

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Letter in response to this column:

Tree-ticking treasure hunt / From Ann Hudson, Burton-in-Wirral, Cheshire, UK