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Fruit for small spaces

Sue Hoy, head gardener at Normanby Hall in North Lincolnshire, cares for a walled garden full of fruit trees trained in various ways. Here she gives some tips on creating compact shapes

Step-over trees make a beautiful and productive edging

Many gardeners believe that fruit growing takes up a great deal of space, that you need a large garden to grow it properly and it’s also seen as something of a specialist subject, needing a knowledge of complicated techniques. Neither of these perceptions is correct. Fruit grown in trained forms can be grown in even the tiniest garden, and its strict shape adds immensely to a garden’s beauty. Admittedly, pruning and training fruit looks very complicated, and is difficult to explain on paper, but in practice it’s incredibly easy.

Training fruit trees into restricted shapes rather than allowing them to grow as free-standing trees or bushes, has been practised for hundreds of years, but reached its peak in the French gardens of the 19th century. It became the fashionable way to grow fruit in the grand kitchen gardens of the Victorian and Edwardian era, but has long been out of favour. This is a shame because although, in my opinion, there’s no more beautiful tree for a small garden than a trained apple tree which fits into a very restricted space and is tailor-made for modern gardens.

Visitors to Normanby are always fascinated by our trained fruit, not only because it looks attractive all through the year but because they realise that they could achieve the same effect at home. ‘Ah yes’, I can hear you saying, ‘but Normanby has huge brick walls; you won’t find those in the average garden’. That’s true, and walls do have some added advantages which I’ll explain later, but the fruit which most impresses our visitors is grown on wires at the edge of the vegetable beds and on iron hoops over the pathways. Besides which, most gardens have fences and house walls – ideal for growing fruit of all kinds.

Start with a maiden

If you want to start training fruit trees from scratch you need maiden whips. These are one-year-old trees that are a single stem with buds that have not started to grow branches. Occasionally you will get some where the branches have started to form but these can be cut off if necessary or left depending on the desired shape.
You can buy part-trained trees from specialist nurseries where the initial shaping has been started but they do cost a lot more.

Choose your shape

Fruit trees are very accommodating; they can be trained into virtually any shape you desire. Here are a few of the more popular ones that are ideal for small gardens.

Step-over trees

A form of training which is suitable for every garden, whether space is found for it at the edge of the vegetable plot or alongside paths or flower borders as an edging, is what the Victorians knew as the single or double horizontal cordon. Today they’re known as step-over trees – much easier on the tongue! They’re still too seldom seen even though they make an attractive and unusual edging and take up virtually no space. Trained on wire strained between metal or wooden posts about 45cm (18in) above the ground, both picking and pruning are easy because they’re so accessible – the peacocks here love them because they’re exactly at beak height.

 

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