From small acorns, mighty oaks grow

Or rather, from medium-sized oaks, mighty oaks grow. Or they would if we weren’t going to cut the growing tips to get them to focus on becoming bushy instead. As part of our drive to get the basic structure of the formal garden in place, we decided to replace some of the many trees we felled with some carefully chosen trees. Once again, rather than planting tiny things and waiting for them to grow, we wanted to cheat at gardening as we did with our bushes. My particular favourites are four five metre high evergreen oaks (Quercus ilex).We are fortunate not to be overlooked in our garden but our neighbours do have a sightline right into our bathroom and guest room and so to spare them some rather unpleasant shocks down the line, we put four of these trees where some of the old ones were. They’re beautiful. It did bring home how much of a specialist job tree planting is though. It took a team a whole day to get these four planted properly and secured in place, which makes me distinctly nervous about the fact that we planted more than thirty bare rooted fruit trees in our new orchard in a single weekend! Watching the professionals at work was certainly an education! So our border is now much less densely populated, but these few trees provide a bit of privacy and a formal look to the part of the garden nearest the house. It had honestly never occurred to me to cheat at gardening by buying mature trees (possibly because of the frankly terrifying cost involved) but I’m really glad that we did. It means that the backdrop planting is done, and we can move down to ground level to do the fun stuff!