Today, home gardeners are using flowering trees more often than ever.
For the most part, gardens are small, and many kinds of flowering trees are suited to confined areas. They provide the needed height, color, and form where there is no room for the more giant shade trees.
The kinds shown here can be used effectively with our present-day low-slung houses, which are equally decorative for traditional homes.
Use them as specimen plants, and combine them with shrubs, perennials, annuals, and bulbs for a pleasing effect.
All are highly colorful in their peak of bloom, and all have distinctive forms — upright, horizontal, rounded, and spreading — suited to your needs.
Various Small-Flowering Trees
Look at these pictures carefully to decide what to plant in your spring garden.
1 and 2. Flowering dogwood — one of the best small trees, with white or pink flowers in spring, vivid fall foliage, and red berries, which the birds like. Hardy and free from diseases and pests, plants have distinct horizontal branching habits, especially in winter.
3. Edible pear — is used ornamentally along the driveway of a suburban garden. A shower of white flowers appears very early in spring. Pears are not large trees growing to 30’ feet, but they develop interesting character as they age.
4. Tree wisteria — the Japanese wisteria trained into a tree form. Like grapes, long, purple flower clusters highlight the specimen in spring. Compound leaves are neat and glossy.
5. Sargent crab-apple, the smallest of the crabs and the only one he can call a shrub. Plants grow as broad as they do tall. Red berries follow pure white flowers.
8. Weeping cherry — rose-pink flowers on drooping branches in early spring. Plants are noted for their delicacy and grace throughout the year.
9. Waterer laburnum — Laburnum is sold either as Laburnum watercress or loss. Golden yellow flowers, similar to those of wisteria, appear in spring. Effective as a specimen plant.
10. White redbud — a white form of the familiar redbud that may be planted for contrast. Trees have airy quality when in flower and are charming when combined with pink or mauve tulips.
11. Japanese dogwood — the Oriental counterpart of the American flowering dogwood. It differs in having pointed instead of notched bracts and in flowering, in full foliage, 3-4 weeks later.
12. Flowering cherry — blooms early enough to combine with daffodils in variety in naturalistic or garden settings.
13. Fringe tree — a large shrub or small tree noted for its great profusion of fleecy white flowers, in drooping clusters, in late spring. Spectacular against ever. Greens grow in part shade.
14. Mountain silverbell — small, white, elfin bells in spring before the large leaves unfold. Plants have a pyramidal shape and are adapted for light shade.
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