I have just returned from a week overseas. A week of spring at its most exuberant, and one in which so much accelerates. First leaf in the trees, the meadows on the rise and the garden surging. On the morning I left, I rose early to walk, absorb and to try to be present. To slow time by looking, rather than planning the next move to keep ahead or on top of the perpetual motion of garden tasks. Our given state as gardeners, despite the fact that one of the primary reasons we garden is to be in the here and now. In spite of best attempts to be witness to the very morning, my early walk was tinged by the pathos of what I might miss during my absence. A complete chapter that in our case here, is marked by the first blossoming of the crab apples.

Their presence on the banks behind the house has been carefully planned and, twelve years after planting, they are beginning to be greater than the sum of their parts. Significant enough to have the gravity it takes to be the happening on the hill that I had imagined when I staked out their positions in the winter of 2012. More than a decade on and the young trees are in their first flush of adulthood, reaching to touch and beginning to arch over the back track to make a tunnel between the hedge on th eother side and the open slopes that rise up behind us.

We never felt overwhelmed by the hillside here when we arrived, but friends remarked upon its feeling of bleakness. All we saw was prospect in the view, the canvas of open fields and the opportunity to tune the views with the trees that we needed to nestle the house. A decade of growth has made for the nestle and the contrast now that only makes the views that much more dramatic. The young trees already offer the feeling of being held whilst you are amongst them and a release to the view as you move through and away.

In terms of time, which stretches and is elastic when you become part of a garden, we have only just begun. In another decade the crabs will have doubled in size or maybe trebled, as growth will now be exponential. The shade they cast under their canopies will become home to a whole new understorey, where the grass will be thinner and the bulbs that much more able to colonise for the first part of spring. We have already started to adjust the autumn bulb planting, following the pools of shadow with an accumulation of narcissus, which suffer from Narcissus Fly out in the sunshine, but not in the shade. Narcissus x odoratus for early in the season and the pale Pheasant’s Eye to cross over with the crab apple blossom.

There are effectively three seasons within the blossoming of the crab apple chapter. The first is opened by Malus transitoria, the cut-leaved crab apple, which links so well in character with the native hawthorns we have allowed to grow out in the hedgerows. This year, perhaps due to our relentlessly wet winter, the flower is coinciding with leaf, where more usually the trees are leafless and cloud-like when in blossom. Widely branched and with a myriad of small, palest pink blossom, the group will soon become one, each tree naturally wider than it is tall and inclined towards a gently risen loaf. From what we can already see, this will be a good year for growth and a contrast to last year’s dry spring, which put pressure on the trees early in the growing season.

Later in the summer they are hung with tiny amber fruits, the size of peas, in their hundreds of thousands. The birds, which have brought birdsong close to the house within the protection of the crabs, leave the fruits until well after the yellow autumn foliage drops so their season is long.

We have two forms of the Tea Crab, Malus hupehensis, which cross over in their flowering with the cut-leaved crab. The first to flower, and in my opinion the better of the two, is the small-berried form from Great Dixter. There they grow in the car park alongside the garden in a magnificent grouping of elderly trees that were planted originally by Christopher Lloyd. Fergus Garrett, the Head Gardener, has added to them recently with young, seed-raised trees, so that in time you will park under an enormous cumulo-nimbus of blossom or shower of berry, depending upon the season.

I have added to our trees here, with a group at the highest point of the top field, so that in time you will be encircled and can step into their world of deliciously perfumed blossom. Malus hupehensis is the finest crab, collected by the great plantsman Ernest Wilson in Hubei province, China in 1900. It is as good as the best flowering cherry and picks up where they have left off.

When I planted the the trees that line the track (main image) I was unaware that there was a larger berried form so, although I had not planned for there being two varieties, I am now pleased to have them both, for the latter flowers a week later. The week I had been worried about losing, when I visited my Dixter trees in their moment of first blossom and the prospect of buds yet to come. Unlike the Dixter form, the marble-sized fruit is not so easily eaten by the birds until the fruits fall to the ground, but it is showier in the autumn and probably the form you are most likely to be supplied.

I always like to have a new generation of the Dixter form on the go, to gift and to have to hand, so every two or three years I gather a handful of the ruby fruits when they are soft and before the birds gorge on them and sow a potful for the cold frame. Protected from mice, which are partial to them in the winter, they germinate easily and young saplings flower in the fourth or fifth year after germination. Nothing is quite like a tree you have grown from seed and the satisfaction of the wait. A wait with a prospect and the slowing of time when you are held, entranced, within their flowery orbit.

Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan

Published 4 May 20243