One thing our new neighborhood is short of is trees. There are some mature trees in the ravine to our south, and quite a few more north of us. However where the houses are being built there are no mature trees. Most of the builders seem to include some kind of basic landscaping so that completed houses get a tree and a bush or two; our builder’s landscaping allowance afforded us a very nice multi-trunk River Birch. However we’d like more trees and toward that end we visited the landscaper earlier this week to see what he had to offer.
There were two that caught our eye and that we are going to add to our yard (unless the landscape people feel our locations won’t work for some reason). The first is a Sugar Tyme Crabapple.
It’ll get to be about 25 or 30 feet tall and will spread out about that wide too. In the spring it has a faintly pink blossom that turns white as it opens, and it has a nice fragrance too. We want to plant this in the rear of the house where we can see it from our bedroom windows and hopefully enjoy its scent through those windows as well.
The landscaper told us that these crabapples are bird friendly as they are somewhat dense. The row of four that we looked at on Tuesday had two nests in them, which pleased both of us. We are hoping our tree will attract nesting birds next spring. (We checked the nest to make sure it wasn’t in use before tagging the tree.)
The other tree that we picked, and one we would have never even thought of if we hadn’t gone to the nursery in person, is a Tartarian Maple. (It seems there are two spellings for this variety of maple, tartarian and tatarian. Both are formally known as Acer tataricum.) What attracted us to this tree was its unusual trunk shape.
In the spring and summer the seeds are visible, and slightly red, and in the autumn it’ll turn a beautiful red color. We want to place this tree to the west of the driveway so that as it grows it’ll shade the driveway and eventually some of the front yard.
We aren’t sure when transplanting will occur, but we are looking forward to having more trees soon.
Great choices! Those white crabapple blossoms are gorgeous
I’m so glad that you can get teenage trees to start with! You’ll probably have woodpeckers and sapsuckers come and check out the maple (for bugs and sap) and yes, birds love crabapple trees for nesting and food.
By: ira2 on June 5, 2011
at 2:19 pm