Choice small ornamental trees
The connoisseur's small trees — camellia flowers and jigsaw bark, handkerchiefs and doves, and a tree that exists only in gardens.
- 01
Trees№ 2775 minMagnolias: Flowers Older Than Bees
Beetle-pollinated flowers with tough tepals, evolved before bees existed — plus the fleshy roots that make them hard to move.
- 02
Trees№ 1354 minDove Tree: The Handkerchief Tree a Plant-Hunter Nearly Died For
A Chinese tree that hangs itself with great white bracts like fluttering handkerchiefs or doves — the object of one of the most famous and calamitous plant-hunting expeditions ever mounted.
- 03
Trees№ 1754 minFranklinia: The Tree That Exists Only in Gardens
A beautiful flowering tree found once, in one spot in Georgia, then never seen in the wild again — extinct in nature for two centuries, and alive today only because two botanists saved its seed.
- 04
Trees№ 4622 minStewartia: Camellia Flowers and Jigsaw Bark
A four-season aristocrat of the tea family — white summer flowers like single camellias, fiery autumn colour, and a flaking patchwork trunk that is the real reason to plant it.
- 05
Trees№ 4353 minSilverbell and Snowbell: The Trees Hung With White Bells
Elegant understorey trees that drape themselves in hanging white bell- and star-flowers each spring — and whose family gives the fragrant benzoin resin of incense and old medicine.
- 06
Trees№ 1763 minFringe Tree: The Old Man's Beard of the Olive Family
A small tree that vanishes each spring under a cloud of fleecy white fringed flowers — a member of the olive family now facing the borer that devastated its cousin the ash.
- 07
Trees№ 1094 minCrape Myrtle: A Hundred Days of Bloom and the Crime of Bad Pruning
The signature summer tree of the American South — crinkled crepe-paper flowers for months, sculptural cinnamon bark all winter — and 'crape murder,' the butchering that ruins millions of them.
- 08
Trees№ 4253 minSeven-Son Flower: The Tree That Blooms Twice
A rare Chinese tree that flowers fragrant white in late summer, then stages a second show as its calyces turn cherry-red — all above a trunk of beautiful peeling, exfoliating bark for the winter.
- 09
Trees№ 4963 minTree Lilac: The Lilac That Grew Up Into a Tree
The one lilac that becomes a real tree — tough, hardy, and clean, foaming with fragrant creamy-white flowers in early summer after the shrubby lilacs are done, and shrugging off the hardest city streets.
- 10
Trees№ 3885 minRedbud and Sassafras: Flowers on Bare Wood, Leaves in Three Shapes
A nitrogen-fixing legume that flowers straight out of its trunk, and an aromatic tree with three different leaf shapes on one branch.