In my local park there is a tree crowned with amber-red haws, big enough to pluck and suck off the flesh. They taste sweet, with a hint of apple – a little mealy but delicious enough. This is the eastern haw, Crataegus orientalis. It has everything a small tree should: flowers in spring, colour in autumn, and fruit that attracts a host of small birds to flit around its branches.
It doesn’t mind if the conditions are windswept, where it becomes sculptured and craggy. It has a spreading habit with slightly pendulous thorny branches, but you can slowly prune it into a shape that fits your space. The leaves are deeply lobed dark green with a woolly bloom that makes them appear silvery in spring, turning buttery yellow and bronze in autumn. The flowers are chalk white with pink anthers, followed by large reddish fruit in autumn. The haws often persist well into winter, hanging like Christmas ornaments.
I’m a big fan of hawthorns, though I like the large-haw types for small gardens rather than our native common hawthorn (C. monogyna). Hybrid cockspur thorn (C. × lavalleei) has large orange-red haws; it has a spreading habit, reaching 5m tall and 4m wide. The glossy, dark green foliage turns coppery bronze in autumn, and the white flowers appear in May, followed by fruit in autumn. Like all hawthorns, it has thorns, so it’s not one for climbing, but it makes a dense head and grows anywhere, even on polluted sites. It’s perfect for the front garden: in summer it screens out the road, and in winter it lets light back in while offering a lovely silhouette.
If you want an evergreen tree that won’t take over your garden, the Japanese loquat (Eriobotrya japonica) is perfect. It’s evergreen, has off-white flowers that smell of hawthorn and if you’re somewhere sheltered and warm, apricot-yellow fruit in summer that taste sharp, succulent and sweet. The leathery leaves suffer frost damage below 5C, so it is best suited to urban gardens, but it springs back from frost and doesn’t mind being pruned to suit its space. A slightly hardier choice would be the strawberry tree (Arbutus unedo). It’s another evergreen, this time with small green leaves, clusters of white flowers in autumn and red fruit that are much loved by birds. (They’re edible, just: best in a jam if you have loads.) Malus ‘Evereste’ is a small crab apple that is covered in large scarlet buds that open and fade to pink. In autumn the foliage turns yellow and bronze among hundreds of yellow, orange and red crab apples. These often persist on the tree till after Christmas, when the blackbirds descend or you make crab apple butter. It’s quite a pollution-tolerant tree.
For pots, try a Japanese maple (an Acer palmatum or one of the many cultivars), with attractive new growth in spring and fiery foliage that burnishes into autumn.
