The run up to Chelsea is always a very exciting and inspirational time. It’s fascinating to see the rapid transformation of muddy plots into luxuriant garden spaces and we garden designers get very excited at the arrival of carefully chosen mature tree stock often having come from distant corners of Europe.
Pleached trees are a great way of introducing both form and screening without taking up much space – one of the reasons they always feature heavily somewhere on the Chelsea showground. We are used to seeing pleached versions of both beech and hornbeam but it was the arrival from Bedfordshire of some particularly beautiful pleached field maples (acer campastre) that caught my eye:
What’s particularly interesting about these trees is that they feature a very good sized frame which will provide plenty of screening. The leaf isn’t too heavy so should allow the passage of some light and also the rootball is not too big. This makes them fairly straight forward to containerize or to under plant.
It’ll be great to see how these little beauties shape up at the show!