Branching Out
If you’re the kind who likes your jeans creased and your underwear ironed, you’ll probably warm to espalier, the art of training unruly plants into neat patterns against a wall. Like many things involving discipline, it might seem unnatural, even cruel, but the results can be poetic. Picture a pear tree fanned along an ugly fence. Or a fretwork of camellias overtaking a cinder-block wall.
Ideal for fruit-growing in tight spots, espalier takes its name from an Italian term for “something to lean on.” The Romans reportedly espaliered peaches, apples and pears. The cooped-up residents of warring Medieval towns plastered their inner ramparts with fruit trees, borrowing heat from sunny walls and feeding themselves when it wasn’t safe to dash to the orchards. The practice reached our shores during Colonial times and was taken up by rich sophisticates. George Washington, for example, went wild with the patterned pears, apples, crabapples and sour cherries around Mt. Vernon.
While gardeners today tend to consider espalier too formal and too much work, it doesn’t have to take such classic shapes as the “palmette verrier” (a candelabrum), the “Belgian fence” (a crosshatched lattice) or the “horizontal cordon” (a Christmas tree). An espalier can be as simple as a single leafy stem that, when planted beside another, can be bent and twined into an arch.
Young plants with flexible branches work best: pyracantha, osmanthus or fig; dwarf, low-chill apples or camellias (opposite page, bottom right). Some kind of framework, such as wires strung between posts, should support the plant about six inches from the wall, allowing room for maintenance and air flow. Creating a pattern is a matter of working with the central stem (or leader) and side branches, gently bending and tying and snipping off whatever messes up the picture--except, of course, a fruit spur.
“It’s not that tough,” says Gary Jones, owner of Hortus, a Pasadena nursery that sells espaliers already started in containers and offers a class in the technique. “Even if you clip the wrong thing, it’s hard to fail because plants are so forgiving. Just cut it back and start over.”
He points out that fruit trees, especially, thrive in the reflected heat of south-facing walls and that harvesting and pruning are a cinch when branches stay low and keep still.
Even a wall, though, is not essential. At Giverny, Monet espaliered apples along a wood rail to fence a lawn. Washington’s pears made a screen for his kitchen garden. In fact, with enough single stems laced together at the top, any sunny yard could have a tunnel of bloom and fruit that both picky compulsives and lazy naturalists would enjoy.
*
Hortus will give an introductory class in espalier on March 1 at 284 E. Orange Grove Blvd. in Pasadena. Reservations are required. For more information, call (818) 792-8255.
