One of my favorite parts of spring is when the gnarly, old apple tree in our backyard explodes with fragrant, pinkish-white flowers. As soon as you take a step out the backdoor, you can smell the incredibly sweet scent of the apple blossoms.

Given the large number of blossoms on our apple tree, we get surprisingly few apples in late summer and fall. One big factor in this is that we have a lonely tree. It’s the only one in our yard and none of the neighbors bordering our backyard have an apple tree. Apple trees are considered self-incompatible, or in other words, they cannot pollinate their own flowers or any flowers of trees of the same variety. If an apple tree can get cross-pollinated from a tree of another apple type, it will greatly improve the quality and yield of the apple harvest.

Our apple tree is large and its small apple production is still way too much for Carol and I to take advantage of, so we’re not too concerned about improving the apple production. If we were, though, we’d have to be sure to pick out another apple tree that blooms at the same time as ours, since the flowers only bloom for a short time. A crabapple tree could also provide suitable pollination if both trees bloom at the same time.

References:

• http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/depts/hort/hil/hil-8301.html
• http://www.urbanext.uiuc.edu/stateline/000928.html

We have a flowering plum tree (Prunus x blireiana) in our back yard. Its deep burgundy leaves contrast strikingly with its light pink, fragrant flowers that pop out in early spring. During the first month of spring, the flowering plum tree really has no match.

It starts out as a bare, dark-barked tree and as the temperatures start to reach the mid- to upper-40s and the daylight is still around after the day’s commute home, small dark pink flower buds add a hint of color to the branch tips. Then, suddenly, the flower buds burst open, covering the tree with a perfumed layer of delicate blossoms. The flowers are tiny with almost-white petals and with dark pink stamens protruding from their centers.

After a week or so of sweet smelling blooms, the petals start falling like a mid-March snow. While the plum tree sheds is blossoms, its leaves start to emerge. The young leaves, shiny and soft, surround the ever-thinning flowers, slowly turning the tree from a light strawberry-frosting-pink to a dark, well, plum-colored purple. At times, when the light is right, the tree is almost black; when the sun shines through the leaves from behind the tree, however, it glows with a merlot-tinted hue.

As the summer burns on, small plums appear throughout the branches. Our plum tree has small fruit–plums only an inch across. The seeds take up the majority of the plum’s insides; the rest, however, is filled with an intensly sweet juice. It’s no wonder the local birds love them. Last year a regular group of birds would fly back and forth from the tree, taking plums to who-knows-where in their beaks. Smaller birds would perch on the branches and pierce the plums and lap up the juice. Luckily, they left a few for us to enjoy.

After all of the plums have been eaten and the temperatures start to drop, the flowering plum tree starts to let go of its leaves, covering the ground this time with its dark red litter. Most of the leaves fell into our flowerbeds; I just left them where they fell to act as a mulch to keep the tulip bulbs a bit warmer over the winter. The rest were raked up and spread among the other flowerbeds. Finally, the tree’s dark branches contrasted against the gray winter skies, resting up for the next year’s spring show.

The monkey puzzle tree (Araucaria araucana) is native to the foothills of the Andes mountains in Chile and Argentina. This living fossil is considered to be the nearest relative to the trees of the Carboniferous period (300 million years ago). The tree definitely has a prehistoric look, with its heavy coating of overlapped, spiny leaves.

Those very sharp leaves are what give the monkey puzzle tree its name. Observing the tree’s spiny armor, a 19th-century Englishman purportedly commented that climbing the tree would be quite a puzzle for a monkey. (Never mind that there are no monkeys in the monkey puzzle tree’s indigenous region.)

The monkey puzzle tree was brought to England in the late 18th century by Archibald Menzies. While visiting Chile, Menzies was served some of the tree’s edible seeds. Having never seen them before, he pocketed some of them, several of which sprouted on his voyage back to Europe. This unusual tree quickly found its way into the rare-plant gardens of Europe and later North America. Araucaria araucana is a relatively common sight as an ornamental tree in Pacific Northwest.

The monkey puzzle tree is dioecious, meaning that there are both male and female specimens of the tree, both of which are needed for the production of viable seeds. The female tree produces large, round cones while the male produces cucumber shaped, dangling cones. Without a pollenating male, the seeds of the female Araucaria araucana are mostly or completely hollow.

Unfortunately, the monkey puzzle tree may be headed for extinction, according to the Global Trees Campaign. During 2001-2002, thousands of hectares of Araucaria araucanaforests in Chile were destroyed by fire. The tree is listed in Appendix I of CITES, meaning that international trade of the tree is forbidden.

Resources:

• http://www.victorialodging.com/monkey_puzzle_tree.htm
• http://www.washington.edu/home/treetour/mpuzzle.html
• http://forestry.about.com/b/a/018424.htm