Spring is a great time to fertilize trees. The rush to produce a new flush of leaves is very nutrient demanding and growth is enhanced and maximized if a general purpose fertilizer is applied in May and early June. Make sure your fertilizer contains the minor trace elements such as manganese and magnesium as well as the staple ingredients of Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium as some plants, like common laurel, depend on these for to achieve good leaf colour.

The fertilizer you apply should be well watered in so the roots can access it and redistribute it throughout the plant. The bust of leaf activity in plants this time of year is coordinated by a corresponding growth in roots so a timely handful of feed can boost the plant greatly and set it up for the rest of the season. Check out our slow release fertilizer, it has all that your trees would want and comes included in your planting kit.

A well-nourished plant is better equipped to stave off perennial pest and diseases, but when you get to the longest day in June, there is little merit in continuing your feeding regime as trees are already scaling down their activities to prepare for dormancy in the autumn. Too much nitrogen in the summer months on greedy trees, such as Acer platanoides types, can lead to cells that can shatter in an early frost as their cell walls are weak from gorging themselves full of nutrient rather than hardening off to protect themselves in winter against freezing temperatures. With cells filled with nutrient rich water suddenly freezing, the stems and trunk of your newly planted tree can rupture.

Coupled with nutrition, watering is a vital part of an aftercare regime for trees that have been planted within the last couple of years. Little and often is the best way to mimic rain and give the soil enough time to grip it. A garden sprinkler does well to achieve this or one of our Tree Hydration Bags does an excellent job to deliver water slowly.

For more information please contact us at Barcham on 01353 723950 or [email protected]

The answer is easy, use pleached trees!

Pleached trees are a one dimensional window frame of foliage that can be used as instant screening above fence height without taking any width away from your garden. They can come in a range of varieties, Hornbeam and Lime being the most common, but for those of you who want spectacular flower why not try Magnolia Yellow River which makes a great floral display for this time of year.

A lot of our customers want evergreen trees to provide screening all year round. We have just pleached these Quercus ilex, Evergreen Oak, which do a great job to secure year round screening privacy. They have a 1.8m stem to match a standard fence height and the 1.5m square panel of evergreen foliage above gives instant gratification.

Evergreen trees always take the longest to grow so are the most expensive. A good compromise is to go for Pyrus calleryana Chanticleer which not only stays in leaf for up to 9 of the 12 months of the year but also rewards you with great spring flower and terrific autumn colour. Evergreen trees are great but always look the same year round so you get both the screening and seasonality with a Chanticleer.

Maintenance of pleached trees is dead easy. Just prune back to the original frame network in March and the trees are good to go again for another season.

For more information on our pleached trees please phone us on 01353 720950 or email us on [email protected]

We have plenty pre done, off the shelf pleached trees to go at but can pleach trees to almost any variety. Just tell us what you want and we will get them ready for you!

After four years of photography and several months’ worth of writing, Time for trees 3 will be available by the end of May and ready for launch at the Chelsea Flowers Show this year.

The first two editions of our reference book have seen over 55,000 copies distributed and colours were approved on the beginning of the print run yesterday to manufacture a further 10,000 hard backs and 15,000 soft backs.
The printing run will take a week, running 24 hours a day, on gloss paper to accommodate the high resolution photography using a state of the art printing press in a London factory that cost millions!

This edition has captured photography of more trees in their natural settings as well as trees in production with scale of a person beside them to get a perspective of their form and size. There has also been a greater emphasis on demonstrating the versatility of some varieties, such as Quercus ilex which can be grown as a 90 foot tree or maintained as a 6 foot evergreen hedge.

Time for trees 3 will make a perfect gift for any tree enthusiast and features over 450 varieties and over 100 differing genus. All the featured trees have a proven track record for planting in the UK and advice is given detailing their preferred environments in which to thrive.

The forward discusses the importance of biosecurity and the ever increasing need for tree genus diversity to future proof plantings from imported pests and diseases in the years to come.

We are all very excited about our new edition and hope you will like it as well! Please email [email protected] to order your copy!

We had some great news today from Buckingham Palace in that our Warrant to Her Majesty the Queen for our tree supply has been successfully renewed and will now run until the end of March 2022.

We are in a very privileged position as we hold two Royal Warrants consecutively, having been awarded Prince Charles’s Feathers last year.

With soil temperatures rising and the days lengthening it is an ideal time for planting both evergreen and deciduous trees. Containerised trees can be planted at any time of year but root-balled and bare rooted trees cannot be successfully transplanted from April / May onwards when they are in leaf as the strain on their wounded roots is to too much to supply the new leaves being created.

Even with containerised trees we recommend planting before they flush in the spring as this growth coincides with root development and if the tree isn’t planted ahead of this, much needed establishment time is lost.
The most active growth for trees occurs from May through to July so if a tree can be planted before this so much the better. The crucial thing to aid establishment is a source of slow release water and this is where our Tree Hydration Bags come nicely into play. Tree roots need oxygen, water and temperature blended in measure to thrive. Too much water and they drown, too little and they drought. Our watering bags deliver the water slowly to give time for the surrounding soil to grip it within the newly establishing rooting zone so the tree can then access it. The Hydration Bags sits nicely on top of the root system and will also help suppress weeds and stops the accidental bumps from mowers or garden strimmers.

To summarise, if you can plant your trees before they come out into leaf in May, you will be working with the tree’s physiology and get faster, more rewarding results. If you have to plant a tree when it is in leaf, little and often watering becomes more crucial for establishment and we would strongly recommend our Tree Hydration Bag to help in this.

For more information feel free to call us on 01353 720950 or try out our instant chat service on this website.

With temperatures gently climbing it is a great time to get out into your garden and prepare for the growing season. Any work now saves a huge amount of effort in the summer when you should be sitting back and enjoying your garden in the comfort of a deck chair rather than battling against herbaceous borders and over rampant shrubs and trees.

Now is a great time to prune your evergreen hedges, trees and shrubs. There are only a few weeks before temperatures consistently rise above 12 degrees Celsius which triggers evergreen plants out of their dormancy period. The best time to prune evergreens is just before they break dormancy, cutting down the time they are deprived of their leaf to a minimum.

With some notable exceptions such as Birch which weep profusely if pruned this time of year, it’s also a good time to tackle deciduous trees. I hammered back my Corylus avallana Zellernus to just 30cm above ground level yesterday from a 2.5 metre multi stem bush, and this will recover to and grow to 1.5m by late summer with large lustrous red and green leaves. The resulting prunings, cut up into 20cm lengths, filled one of our 65lt pots and this will keep me in kindling for my log burner for all of next winter’s fires. That would have cost me over £20 if I had bought it from my local outlet and I have stored the bag in my garden shed to gently dry off over the summer months to be ready for action by October.

For non-woody plants that can’t be usefully recycled for later on, now is also a great time to keep filling up your green waste wheelie bin with the dead tops of all the ferns and herbaceous plants that have died down over winter. My green bin collection is every two weeks and if I keep them filled this time of year it saves no end of grief later on in the season. For those with more space to compost their own material, these tops can be used for soil ameliorant later on down the line. Not only is it a very negative thing for a plant to be pruned in leaf, it is also twice the job to get rid of the prunings than it is now when they are dormant. Try and avoid battling your garden in May and June. It’s twice the job then than doing it now and you will be toiling in the weather we have been so long waiting for to enjoy

As media coverage and public concern about the latest threat to Britain’s plants increase, our Managing Director, Mike Glover has warned a strict quarantine system is the only answer to combat this serious peril. “Anyone buying trees should ask where they have come from and if they have an audit trail. If they are not satisfied with the answers, they should simply walk away and not buy from that supplier”. The issue of quarantine has been recognised by Lord Framlingham who has called for action in this matter in the House of Lords. Please see the following video explaining this further: please click here to view

Mike continues “Xylella is not in the UK yet, but if plant material keeps coming across from the continent without any thought to bio-security it is only a matter of time before this menace becomes a reality. Wholesale nurseries are an obvious sector to focus on plant quarantine, but more plants are imported by garden centres, supermarkets, landscape architects and designers, as well as the general public buying online. Buying must become more considered to protect our industry and the wider landscape.

“There is a solution, and it has already been put into practice by Barcham. In 2014 we published a six-page document outlining our commitment to bio-security, the first UK tree nursery to do so. Central to our commitment is the pledge we will continue not to import trees and sell them to customers for immediate planting into the UK landscape. All imported trees are held on the nursery for a full growing season, during which time they are subject to regular rigorous inspection for pest and disease, including those conducted by DEFRA.
BBC Breakfast news covered this story at Barcham last week: please click here to view

“Bio-security is a real and ever-present issue we must face. Despite Lord Framlingham’s efforts the authorities are not taking a lead on this; it requires companies and individuals to take responsibility for their actions to keep our industry intact. Our policy was taken voluntarily and at significant financial cost to the nursery, but we know it is the right thing to do”. While the majority of trees at Barcham are home-grown, every consignment of imported trees is given a unique batch number on arrival, clearly visible on every tree the nursery sells, thereby providing a complete audit trail from supplying nursery to planting in the UK landscape. Once they have been through a full growing season on the nursery and been passed clear of pest and disease by DEFRA, the problem associated with imported stock is nullified.

The Xylella bacterium, which lives in the plant xylem tissue, has been present in Europe since October 2013, when it was reported in olive groves in Apulia, Italy. In July 2015 it was reported on Corsica and then in mainland France. The European Food Safety Authority currently lists more than 350 plant species, from 204 genera and 75 botanical families, affected by Xylella fastidiosa. The European Commission’s website calls it “one of the most dangerous plant bacteria worldwide, causing a variety of diseases with huge economic impact”.

Buying trees and plants that have been proven UK grown can counter this new threat, ask your suppliers to make sure you know where your plants are coming from….

The third edition of our reference book ‘Time for Trees’ is coming together nicely with the A-Z listings completed at the designers last week. Most of the text was done in August and the supporting photography has been work in progress over the last four years.

The preceding editions of our book that have been despatched to date stands at over 50,000 copies making it one of the most read reference books for trees in the UK.

Our new edition features 47 additional varieties, including great trees for seasonal interest such as Acer platanoides Pacific Sunset, Metasequoia glyptostroboides Goldrush and Liquidambar styraciflua Silhouette, and will be available to buy online in hardback or softback from the end of May. We launch our new edition at the Chelsea Flower Show on the 24th May where our hardback version, usually £25, will be on offer for just £10 as we won’t need to post or package them!

It has been such a mild winter at Barcham this year the stock is more advances than usual. Hamamelis Arnold Promise and Hamamelis Jelena have both flowered and our Prunus Autumnalis Rosea has a smattering of early blossom before it goes at full tilt in April. Prunus Okame is in full flower and is the earliest to give its spring show.

For trees breaking dormancy there are three standout candidates for the first one into leaf: Betula ermanii, Prunus maackii Amber Beauty and Pyrus calleryana Chanticleer. I have a large Ermins Birch in my garden and it is always in full leaf by the end of March, a good three weeks ahead of other Birch varieties and it is unaffected by late frosts. When a tree is early to leaf it corresponds that it is early to fall and this is certainly true of Betula erma tllow in late September onwards before shedding its leaves completely in October when most other genus are still going strong. On the other hand, Pyrus calleryana Chanticleer is one of the last trees to lose its leaves making it a good candidate for screening as the cost can be a lot lower than evergreen varieties.

For most trees, leafing up later is a defence mechanism to prevent young tender leaves getting scotched by late frosts. The young foliage on Oak and Ash will go black if it suffers this fate. Tture is not wasteful and this is why Que and Fraxinus are the last two genus to leaf up at Barcham in the spring.

For those of you planning events in the garden it is often possible to pick a variety that is performing on the month you most want it to. Give us a call on 01353 720950 for more details on this of e mail us on [email protected]