Do We Need More Trees in Our Gardens?
REFLECTIONS FROM THE GARDEN
Marcus Bergin
8/25/20269 min read
Do We Need More Trees in Our Gardens?
Stand at an upstairs window and look beyond the boundary of your own garden.
In some places you'll see roofs, fences and sheds, with almost nothing rising above them — every garden ending at roughly the same height, the view turning into a row of separate rectangles laid out behind the houses. Now imagine the same view with trees. Not a line of enormous oaks squeezed between buildings, but layers of foliage at different heights — a crab apple flowering above one fence, an old pear leaning over another, a rowan carrying berries, a multi-stemmed shrub that's gradually taken on the shape and presence of a small tree. One garden contributing a single crown, another three or four, mature trees further off filling in the rest of the picture. The gardens would still be separate pieces of land. The trees would connect them anyway.
We've grown used to talking about tree planting in terms of woodlands, public parks, new developments, roadside schemes. All of that matters enormously. But there's another stretch of land scattered through our towns and villages that gets far less attention: the ground immediately around our own homes. Individually, many gardens are small. Together they cover a considerable area, and what we choose to grow in them affects more than the view from our own kitchen window.
A garden tree casts shade across soil, plants and people. Its leaves intercept sunlight before that heat ever reaches the ground, and water moving through the tree and evaporating off its leaves cools the air around it too. On a proper hot day, the difference between sitting under a living canopy and sitting under a parasol isn't hard to feel — both give shade, but only one is actually changing the little climate around it.
This shows up especially in gardens facing south or west, where paving, walls and fences hold and reflect heat all day. A well-positioned tree can shade a seating area, protect part of a border, and cut the amount of direct sun reaching the house through the hottest part of the day. A deciduous one does that in summer while letting far more light through once winter comes round. The shade moves as the sun moves — one side of the garden in the morning, another by afternoon — creating a whole range of conditions rather than dividing the plot permanently into sun and shade.
It also gives a garden depth. Something at eye level, and something above it. Branches filter the view, hide part of the garden, make you curious about what's beyond. Even a modest tree stops a small garden feeling like a lawn with some borders fenced around it. New-build gardens often feel especially exposed before they mature, and it isn't only the lack of plants — it's the lack of height. Everything sits below the fence line while windows, walls and neighbouring houses look straight down on it from above. A tree starts to correct that. It may take years before it offers any real screening, but even a young one changes how the space feels — gives the eye somewhere to rest above the boundary, brings a bit of movement against the sky, hints that the garden won't always look this new and exposed.
Most gardening gives a quicker reward than that. Perennials fill a border in a season or two. Annuals flower within months of sowing. A tree works to a completely different timescale — we plant something that may still be developing long after our original border plans have been forgotten. That's part of the attraction, and part of the responsibility.
Choosing a tree from a row at the nursery can be deceptively easy. It looks perfectly manageable in its pot, so we carry it home and find a spot that suits its current size. The more important question is whether that spot will still suit it in twenty, forty, sixty years. Slow-growing and small aren't the same thing. A tree described as reaching six metres after ten or twenty years hasn't necessarily stopped growing there — some genuinely have a compact ultimate size, others simply haven't reached maturity within the timeframe on the label. A young silver birch, beech or field maple can look perfectly reasonable in a small suburban garden, and the full-sized tree can eventually take up far more room than was ever really available to it. We shouldn't have to keep a naturally large tree permanently cut back through expensive, increasingly awkward pruning simply because we planted it somewhere it could never actually grow properly.
Which is where the enthusiasm for planting more trees needs a bit of restraint. The right tree improves a garden for generations. The wrong one dominates the soil, blocks windows, overhangs the roof, damages walls, or leaves whoever gardens there next with the cost and difficulty of taking it out. It can also land most of its downsides on a neighbour who had no say in the original decision — a tree planted against the boundary because that's where there seemed to be space can end up spreading half its crown into somebody else's garden, leaving them the shade, the leaves and the branches while we keep the trunk and the benefit. Loving trees ourselves doesn't oblige anyone else to feel the same way about ours.
Sometimes the middle of the garden is actually the better spot. That feels wasteful at first, since we're used to pushing permanent plants to the edges and keeping the centre for lawn. But a tree set nearer a path, a seating area or a central border puts shade exactly where it's useful, its canopy moving above the garden while the trunk takes up comparatively little ground. Planting underneath it turns the tree into part of the garden rather than an object stuck along the fence line. A small collection of trees can even create the feeling of a miniature woodland without needing an enormous plot — narrow or upright forms, multi-stemmed trees and tree-like shrubs open up far more possibilities than one standard specimen standing alone in a lawn.
Large shrubs are worth more consideration here than they usually get. Hazel, cotinus, elder, cornus, big cotoneasters and other substantial shrubs can be left to gain height, or gradually have their lower growth removed to form a light, multi-stemmed canopy. They can give enclosure, shade and nesting cover without ever reaching the scale of a full-sized forest tree — whether we call the result a tree or a shrub matters less than what it actually does for the space.
Fruit trees are another good answer, especially once the rootstock and eventual size are properly understood. Apples, pears, plums, cherries, quince and medlar bring spring blossom, summer shade, fruit and autumn interest, and trained forms let us use walls, arches and narrow spaces where a spreading crown would never fit. They do come with work — fruit has to be picked, used, given away or cleared off the ground, pruning may be needed, and some years the harvest is wonderful while in others frost, drought or poor pollination leaves you with very little. A tree isn't maintenance-free just because it's good for wildlife. Leaves fall. Fruit drops. Branches sometimes need attention. Gutters need clearing. Roots compete with whatever's planted beneath them, and dry shade under an established canopy can become a genuine gardening challenge. None of that's a reason to avoid trees. It's simply part of living with one.
We seem increasingly tempted to judge plants by how much work they create. Leaves become mess. Fallen blossom becomes mess. Fruit on the ground becomes mess. A garden's somehow expected to provide flowers, shade and wildlife while producing no visible evidence that any living process actually took place — and a tree was never going to meet that particular expectation. Its leaves aren't waste, even if they need moving off paths, lawns and ponds now and then. Gathered up and left to break down, they make leaf mould that goes straight back into the garden. Left where they fall, they shelter small creatures and add organic matter to the soil. The tree takes from the ground. It gives a fair amount back too — flowers offering nectar and pollen, fruit and berries and seeds and insects feeding birds and other wildlife, branches providing nesting and resting places, bark developing cracks and textures occupied by creatures we'll probably never notice. Rain gets caught by the canopy, held for a while, released more slowly towards the ground. The larger and older a tree gets, the more complex the habitat around it becomes — one reason a newly planted tree can't simply replace a mature one overnight.
We often understand what a tree was worth only after it's gone. One that seemed to throw too much shade gets felled, and the following summer the garden's noticeably hotter. Plants that lived beneath its canopy are suddenly exposed. Privacy disappears. A view once softened by foliage becomes a wall or a window. Birds that used to move through its branches don't stop there any more. Removing a tree can change a garden in a day. Replacing what it did can take decades.
Which raises a question that gets far less attention than planting: how do we plan for the trees already in our gardens to grow old? Gardens often hold trees of a similar age, because they went in when the house was built or the garden first laid out. Wait until all of them decline before thinking about replacements, and the loss of canopy can arrive all at once. Where there's room, younger trees can go in well before the old ones start failing — not necessarily right beside the originals, where the competition could be fierce, but somewhere else in the garden, letting the next generation get established while the existing trees keep providing shelter. Succession planning sounds like a grand phrase for a domestic garden, but the principle's simple enough: if a tree matters to the character of a place, don't wait until it's gone to think about what comes after it.
We also need to think about whether the trees we plant now will actually suit the climate they'll mature into. A species that's always done well in a particular area may struggle through repeated heat, drought or waterlogged winters. A tree billed as drought tolerant might still need several years of careful watering while it establishes. One that copes fine with hot summers may hate heavy British soil through a wet winter. That doesn't hand us a simple list of future-proof trees — soil, rainfall, exposure and local microclimate still matter enormously, and a tree thriving in one garden can scorch or drop its leaves early in another. Even familiar recommendations like rowan, birch, amelanchier and ornamental cherry can't be treated as universally reliable for every small garden. We'll have to watch what actually survives locally and learn from that.
Look at mature trees in nearby gardens, parks and streets. Notice which stay healthy through a hard summer and which look repeatedly stressed. Find examples close to full maturity rather than judging a species from a photograph of a young specimen. Check both height and spread, and look at its natural habit — whether it responds well to pruning, or whether cutting it back regularly would spoil the very shape that made it worth growing. The aim isn't to find a tree we can keep under control forever. It's to find one whose natural life we can actually accommodate.
There'll still be gardens where planting a tree isn't the right answer. A neighbour's mature canopy might already cast plenty of shade. The garden might sit too close to vulnerable structures, or restrictions may limit what can go in. A large shrub might give all the height and shelter that's actually needed. In some plots, keeping an open sunny area contributes more variety than adding another layer of canopy would. The question probably isn't whether every single garden should contain a tree. It's whether our streets and neighbourhoods, taken together, contain enough of them. One garden holds the large mature tree. The next contributes a crab apple. Another has trained pears, a hazel, a multi-stemmed cornus. Some stay open, giving sunlight and flowering borders between the rest. Seen together, those separate choices build a proper varied treescape rather than a row of identical gardens.
There's a real generosity in planting a tree, because so much of its value belongs to the future. We might enjoy the first blossom, watch birds start using its branches, sit beneath its early shade — and we might also move on before it reaches the shape we imagined for it. Someone else may end up gardening beneath it, complaining about its leaves, hanging a bird feeder from it, or grateful for its shade one summer hotter than any we remember. That doesn't make planting it pointless. It might be the whole point.
Most of our gardening is about altering things for an immediate effect. Trees ask us to think further out than that — to picture a view from a window in twenty years' time and decide whether it should hold more leaves, more movement, more life than it does today.
I'd like it to.
Not a tree in every available gap. Not an oak six feet from the conservatory, or a forest tree destined to overwhelm a postage-stamp garden. The right trees, given the room to become what they're actually meant to become.
Planting a tree isn't merely filling a space. It's deciding what kind of place we'd like this to become, long after we've finished gardening it ourselves.
Happy Gardening.
Marcus
