As far as aesthetics go, I think a lot comes down to the ratio of time/money/effort per acre. My co-conspirator Holly down in Boston puts his considerable skills and spare time to work on a concentrated area of maybe 1/8 acre, and the outcome looks absolutely fantastic (see above). At the other extreme I spread what’s probably a similar level of spare-time effort over 1-2 acres, and as a result I perpetually struggle to hang on to the bare minimum maintenance, and if ever the result briefly looks good, that’s gravy.
I don’t have a lot of good pictures but the right side gives a pretty good sense of what the orchard looks like; I try to keep the grass beat back under the trees with a string trimmer ~3x per summer and a bucketload of old wood chips every couple of years, but it’s a losing battle. I planted on seedling rootstock and the trees are taking their time, so in the meanwhile I experiment with this and that between the rows; a couple summers ago we planted some buckwheat and harvested inefficiently by hand; I think this was the volunteer crop that came up that I’m tilling in before planting winter wheat.
The wheat did pretty well; last fall I tilled in the stubble and broadcast some winter rye; come spring we’ll see what that does. Because the trees are so far apart I learned to graft and started sticking in peaches between each apple; the foreground here is one of them that I think we transplanted out of the nursery bed in the spring.
We’re still waiting for more than a bucket or two of apples, but the peaches don’t mess around; the early ones ripen reliably before our cool summer winds down into fall (I think these are a Fedco variety they call Lars Anderson).
What I’m doing here is probably as much or more as I can reasonably take on as a hobby, and if/when it comes into production I’ll have an insane amount of fruit. But there’s always a few more varieties that seem really interesting, and I haven’t always been able to resist the urge to fire up the chainsaw and open up some more newground. It’s an addiction I guess…
What is so difficult is time, and money. And as for manicured lawns, and ordered rows, I don’t find them beautiful at all. I like landscapes that look like nature planned them, not humans.
@Naomi94, you started an interesting topic and we’ve seen some very nice gardens and orchards as a result. I love the look of formal gardens but I’m not good at designing them myself so I let nature do its thing and I just try to keep things balanced and clean. For many creating and maintaining orchards, there are priorities that outweigh beauty. For some, quantity of fruit, health of fruit, variety of fruit and time devoted to the orchard leave aesthetics far behind.
I have two variegated ones, Betty Sheffield and Mercury. Mercury is doing better so far and has bigger blooms, but Betty Sheffields are probably my favorite because their blooms are so divers. The constantly sport so a bush will have completely white flowers and nearly completely pink ones and every imaginable combination in between…
I like your orchard, is has a clean, simplicity about it.
Some people think underplanting needs to be a whole bunch flowers and bushes. We all have our own ideas. My ideas"at least for now" is to keep thinks simple and no more than three underplant varieties are needed.
I understand your point. I have two boys at home and only so much time available (half of the time just keeping them from stepping in the veggie patch )
That’s why my backyard underplanting is only lavender. I thought, fields of lavender are very beautiful and don’t require much water. The shape and texture of lavender brings out something special in my orchard.
As folks have mentioned, beauty is a subjective thing. I can appreciate the work it takes to create a highly formalized garden or orchard but don’t care to take the amount of labor and time it takes to install and maintain such an artifice. I find beauty in the ephemeral world of nature, plus it takes no work at all!
In the east coast, broad leaf flowers and fruit trees are problematic, because the flowers provide habitat for plant bugs- broad leaf weeds in mowed turf is almost as bad. The way they are used in these pictures also would provide cover for girdling voles- but I can see how you are proud of your pretty, inventive and very well tended landscape.
However, for my own garden and orchard, function is the compass that pulls the aesthetic design- and I also prefer a more free and wild look- where vegetables and flowers live together and the landscape isn’t divided by rectangles. See how your lettuce is carefully laid out with the same variety in each rectangle- that is very annoying to my eye- very contrived looking- but that is entirely a matter of taste. I also use raised beds with walking space between to aid in harvesting and increase yields- my raised beds are frameless, which encourages looser soil that warms early- it is extremely productive.
We all develop our own style of gardening, and that is what makes it creative and interesting. They are expressions of our individual tastes and ideas. That said, in my entire life, I’ve never seen a backyard orchard that looked ugly- and I’ve probably seen more of them than anyone on this forum. Neglected, yes, but never ugly.
Now houses, on the other hand, can be really ugly. So can shopping malls. Why are American shopping malls so ugly? Makes you grateful for Amazon.
I love lavender. Unfortunately it does not love humidity in a hot climate that much. It’s a Mediterranean species that likes heat but not the combination of heat and humidity. I have one little plant of four to make it through last summer. Rosemary which superficially looks similarly but does not have as showy blooms does much better. I have one rosemary plant which besides being pretty is a key ingredient in rosemary plum jam which in tern is a key ingredient for my rosemary plum graze which I use in grilling stakes, pork chops and chicken. God bless.
While the photos may come from various places around the internet, I’m guessing they are representative of what Naomi finds attractive in a fruit orchard. On a thread about making orchards more aesthetically pleasing, that’s fair enough. Others may have better practical advice on how to get there in a given climate, and that’s fair as well.
I for sure don’t know how one would go about having low growing herbaceous perennials growing right around the roots of pear or apple trees given that neither species likes having their roots grubbed around and given that grass and weeds will constantly invade and need to be dug out. Obviously someone knows how to do it, because the pictures show that they did it. God bless.
Here tulips work well, but I hate these modern hybrids that cannot survive. My mom’s old school tulips come up year, after year, after year. My mom passed in 1986, yet her tulips are still here! When/if I move I have to take them with me.
To fill other areas with returning blooms I went with species tulips. I guess I’m just old school. I tend to have heirlooms in every category of plants I grow. Even my orchard has heirloom trees, most have apple I have peach.[quote=“hoosierquilt, post:125, topic:9309”]
Lavender planted nearby is a great choice, as it will attract pollinators for your stone and pome fruits that require cross pollination. Plus, it’s pretty, smells lovely, and can be harvested and dried for cooking
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Some lavenders are not recommended for cooking, many types exist. Not sure why?[quote=“castanea, post:144, topic:9309”]
And as for manicured lawns, and ordered rows, I don’t find them beautiful at all.
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On man’s meat is another poison. I do find them very beautiful. I love what man does with nature. I think English gardens are the perfect example. Nothing wrong with the natural look, but for me, when I think of nature, I think of survival of the fittest, the killing fields of wild animals. How lions kill Cheetahs and leave them to rot, just because they both eat the same food source, more for the lions with less cheetah’s around. I have also seen this with my own eyes, raccoons killing other raccoon’s babies, so the attacking coon’s offspring has a better chance of survival. I see nature as cold and cruel. I don’t want that in my garden.
It just depends on how you look at things. I like natural looking gardens, but sometimes see it as an excuse for the way one’s garden looks, not really a planned aesthetic look well thought out.
I like to distinguish between a garden, which may have fruit trees as an element, and an orchard, in which trees for the production of fruit is the primary function. I love Daemon’s well-maintained orchard, with its own bee hive.
Naomi - it’s generally considered bad form to post other people’s pictures without attribution. We’d love to see what your garden actually looks like, not what your pinterest board looks like.
Like Alan, functionality takes precedence over beauty in my own plantings.
As has been said so many times, beauty has a somewhat subjective nature to it, imo. I think, it’s a sort of projection of our personality, or a projection of our higher goals.
For gardening, I like clean lines (the opposite of Alan) but I was raised driving by corn fields where farmers prided planting rows perfectly straight and perpendicular to the road. Still, my personality is such that I prefer architecture squared and uniform. From an ascetic standpoint, I place a high value on continuity in gardening and architecture.
My daughter is more like Alan and prefers a more wild and free look. I can (and do) appreciate that look too, just not as much as I like the more rigid and powerful look of right angles.
That said, I can hardly stand to look at modern architecture. Even Frank Wright’s amazing creativity of the waterfall house is ugly to me. It looks too much like a STAMP on nature.
You made me smile when you said that. and I understand, we all have our thing that fits our lifestyle and we are willing to fuss about. I have a friend who always tells me the same thing, and yet, she has an obsession with trees. Not fruiting just spruce, maple, tamarack, birch etc. Her yard is huge and she laboriously trims, weed whacks, mows, sprays etc. My husband teases her about when she will be able to eat the trees.
