Our Trees.
When we began to think about what we wanted to have in our garden, we soon decided that fruit trees would be wonderful. The idea would be that people would be able to pick the fruit as they walk by!
The Cherry 'Stella' dwarf tree produces an abundance of sweet and delicious dark red high-quality fruit from late July. The trees are hardy, reaching a height of up to 4m with deciduous luscious green foliage. Magnificent white flowers will begin to bloom from April to May, encouraging pollinators such as butterflies into the spring garden. Keeping the tree shorter for this smaller area, means we will need to prune it down in October to the desired height. In Christian art the Christ Child often holds some cherries to symbolise paradise.
The Ballard Beauty Apple is a dessert apple, first raised by Mr. A. Norman in Bedford and first recorded in 1946. A Cox’s Orange seedling. A medium to large greenish yellow skinned apple flushed with scarlet. Firm and slightly acidic flesh. A useful long keeping dessert apple. We are blessed with so many apple variations in this country. The abundance of fruit which can be grown so easily reminds us of the way in which God created the fruit of the trees for us to share. And in the beginning - it was obvious that we were intended to be vegetarian!
Flowering period C
Pick late Oct, use Oct-Dec
The Victoria Plum tree is the most popular plum variety in the world. The flesh is dark yellow with some streaks of red, moderately juicy and sweet, flavour fair. Perfect for eating fresh when they're picked ripe from the tree or can also be cooked into jams and desserts or used for bottling and canning. Beautiful white flowers appear during the spring making this a very attractive tree. Plums were not common in Christian symbolism; but were included in 17th century Dutch still life paintings as part of showing off how prosperous the owner was!
The Scrumptious is the most popular apple, self-fertile, tasty and easy to grow. Named for its wonderful complexity of flavours it has been carefully bred and selected specifically for garden conditions. It is also frost hardy when in flower, thin skinned for children and can be eaten straight from the tree at any time during September, and we hope you enjoy picking them! Of course, the apple has had a bad press as it is always presumed that the fruit that Eve picked was an apple. But we do not know which fruit was actually picked!
Native trees are all excellent for encouraging local wildlife. These varieties have evolved over many thousands of years alongside other plants and animals so they have all adapted to be dependent on one another. The Silver Birch is a favourite because it is so pretty. And is also known as The ‘Lady of the Woods’ because it is a graceful slender tree. The beauty and the grace of this tree also reminds us of many paintings of the Blessed Virgin Mary who seems so graceful even when she is faced with an angel asking for her to do something so amazing!