TREE OF THE MONTH

 

 

 

 

 

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Malus domestica

January

They are the things that immediately catch winter visitors' eyes. There are eight of them in the walled garden: gaunt grey mushroom shapes like nests of serpents, each on a pillar, busily intertwining, grotesquely knobbly, fascinating to examine.

It was Lady Carlyle's original idea to prune her orchard apple trees to form summer parasols, and we have stuck to her plan. After sixty or seventy years of their strict regime, every summer shoot cut back to its base in winter, they have the air of sculptures, cool flaky grey, their lower branches sometimes bright emerald with moss.

When they flower they could almost be giant pink carnations; in summer their shade is deep and cool and in autumn their fruit, yellow and red, turns them into the trees in a Persian painting of a paradise garden.

 

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