On the night of August 31, every plum tree here burst into flower, the day before's bare branches suddenly billowing white, as if each tree had checked the calendar and muttered 'Spring tomorrow. Better bloom'. Some of the peaches turned pink too, as well as almond blossom. I've never known such a perfectly synchronised spring.
This is a secret, possibly unknown to many landscape gardeners: while varieties of apple, peach, almond, pomegranate, plum and cherry grown solely for their blossom look spectacular, the fruiting varieties are equally dazzling, and give you a magnificent feed into the bargain.
So why bother with flowering fruit trees that don't actually fruit? Some ornamental fruit trees bloom slightly earlier, but the main reason is a very slight problem with fruit trees along the footpath. Park underneath them at the wrong time and you'll ruin the duco, or in the case of large fruit like '16 Ounce' apple, you may even get a few dents in the roof.
Fruit grown on public space needs to be managed, which adds enormously to the cost of maintaining them, unless, of course, residents have been warned/tempted by a pamphlet explaining when the fruit will be ready and inviting them to pick it, with possibly a few recipes too.
After the 1930s depression and then well into the 90s there was also a strong feeling that 'nice' people didn't grow edibles in their front garden, but should segregate them out the back, or even, preferably not have any at all, because growing apples or spuds meant you couldn't afford to buy elderly and tasteless ones at the supermarket.
The six best blossom trees for Canberra are, probably, okay, possibly, apple, peach, almond, pomegranate, plum and, cherry. I suspect that in two months' time I might offer you entirely different choices, including acacias, native white cedars and many others not blooming right now so I've forgotten how magic they are.
There are disadvantages, too, in growing peach, almond and cherry trees in Canberra. Peach trees look plain ugly except when in bloom or when the peaches are ripe and blush red, assuming they are a blush red variety. The skin of my favourite peach, Golden Queen, is a vague greenish yellow. Peach leaves are dull. The bark is even duller.
Almonds are like peach trees, only worse - the shape, leaves and bark are similar, and an almond harvest is never ornamental unless you are looking at them gastronomically. Cherry trees have stunning bark, and often a naturally graceful shape, and quite attractive leaves, which sadly are also attractive to pear and cherry slug, a sawfly larva, that will cover each leaf with tiny black 'slugs' that grow into larger slugs. By the time you have noticed they are there, each leaf will have an unsightly tracery of damage or may be hanging limply. Once they've been blemished, that's pretty much it for the year. Pear and cherry slug-damaged leaves don't heal.
The best spot in the garden, in fact, for peaches, almond and cherries, is 'down the back', where you can feast on the sight of spring blossom from kitchen or bedrooms, but aren't close enough to notice boring leaves or pest damage in summer and autumn.
This leaves apples, plums and pomegranates. Most ornamental apples - 'crab apples' - have hard fruit that is still big enough to be made into jelly, or even pickled, to be eaten as a pre-dinner snack like olives, though they are nothing like olives, except in being delicious. We grow a few 'species' of crabs whose blossom shrivels to a tiny speck that then drops off, and yes, they do look wonderful, but less than modern varieties bred to have not just an overwhelming abundance of flowers, week after week, but also bright crab apples that are beautiful in their own right, as well as edible.
The most gorgeous plums are possibly the red leafed varieties. Watch out when you buy them, as they may well be a non-fruiting ornamental. Ditto pomegranates, whose labels need to be thoroughly inspected too. I've no idea why anyone would want a pomegranate that didn't fruit, as they are naturally neat trees that rarely spread far enough to park a car under, so unlikely to dent the bonnet.
There is, sometimes, a problem with parrots and rosellas who gorge on pomegranate seeds and then deposit their sticky, stain-producing droppings on white cars, but as the droppings usually fall where the bird is perched - i.e. just under the trees, or the bird flies away, to 'drop' on someone else's property, you are unlikely to be saving your car's gleam by sticking to non-fruiters.
We triple our fruit trees' blooming time by growing rambling roses up them, like Climbing Albertine and Dorothy Perkins. This was initially to foil the wallabies, as wallabies can't reach roses that high up, but it's worked wonderfully - prolonged blooming, any black spot hidden under tree leaves, and possums don't like thickets - they much prefer well pruned trees, like small possum freeways - and so both fruit and roses are less likely to be possum banquets.
There is a glory in spring blossom after a cold winter that you never see in warmer climates where there's strong growth all year round. Spring is a sheer, evanescent delight that leaves you grinning for no reason at all, or rather a very good reason. It's spring! But spring is even better when you know that the blossom's froth is just the beginning, with a harvest of fruit scents and tastes and tarts to come.
This week I am:
- Almost certainly getting round to planting the potatoes.
- Still waiting for the second asparagus spear of spring.
- Marvelling at a seedling hellebore which had blooms for the first time, a rich, almost uncanny bright purple and unlike any I have seen before. It glows.
- Wishing Possum X would choose a route from our living room ceiling cavity to 'his' lemon tree that does not involve tramping on the daffodils each night.
- Waiting for the new purple-leafed smoke bushes to send out leaves, to see if they are truly purple. I should have waited till summer to buy them, when I could have been sure, instead of depending on the colour in the catalogue.
- Mooching, simply mooching, to see which tree is blooming and to dream of fruit.
