Plum Blossoms
All over town the flowering fruit trees are blooming for Easter. In our neighborhood it is purple plum trees up and down the streets, lining the sidewalks. They are everywhere.
What is it with builders and purple leaved trees? In Connecticut our new development was planted with over 100 purple Norway maples, called 'Crimson King'. They were terrible street trees, and a forest of forbidding maroon foliage was awful.
Here in Nava Ade, the builder lined the streets with purple plums. They do have beautiful pink flowers in April, but so much dark purple foliage in summer is a lot.
Why so many purple trees? Not only is the monoculture of a single street tree used in endless lines too much, but the choice of purple plums for street trees is a poor one.
They do really well in Santa Fe conditions, so I'm sure the builder chose an easy to grow tree that was probably inexpensive. But these plums are little trees, rounded and shrubby at their best, and way too wide and low for sidewalks underneath. They are patio specimen trees, to be used singly for impact and given room to spread their low crowns.
Branching starts very low on the trunk. So to allow walkers to pass under, every one of these hundreds of plum trees has been pruned up by the maintenance crew. The work is constant, the resulting shapes are odd and the health of these hacked-to-death trees is not good.
Some wind up in a funny lollipop shape. Some wind up irregular and misshapen. Some survive only on one side, like the poor thing directly in front of our house, which is tilted because the sidewalk half is gone.
The stunted one at the foot of our driveway is never going to get big and round the way it should. It's been pruned so severely that it is in decline.
And when the flowers go by and the leaves come out, the whole neighborhood has long unbroken lines of dark purple trees up and down the streets.
But the early spring flowers are pretty, no question. What a lovely sight at the end of a brown winter. And winter in Santa Fe, with no snow and no rain has been very brown.
In between some of the purple plums another type of tree has been planted, a honeylocust, so there was an attempt to break up the monoculture at points. The honeylocusts leaf out much later -- you can see the bare branches near some of the flowering plums.
Until the honeylocust trees green up, the pink flowering plums are the whole show. And they truly are lovely, even if misshapen, in decline, and disastrously overused.
So I'll look at them up close to enjoy their prettiness if not their form, and enjoy the promise of spring. Happy Easter.
What is it with builders and purple leaved trees? In Connecticut our new development was planted with over 100 purple Norway maples, called 'Crimson King'. They were terrible street trees, and a forest of forbidding maroon foliage was awful.
Here in Nava Ade, the builder lined the streets with purple plums. They do have beautiful pink flowers in April, but so much dark purple foliage in summer is a lot.
Why so many purple trees? Not only is the monoculture of a single street tree used in endless lines too much, but the choice of purple plums for street trees is a poor one.
They do really well in Santa Fe conditions, so I'm sure the builder chose an easy to grow tree that was probably inexpensive. But these plums are little trees, rounded and shrubby at their best, and way too wide and low for sidewalks underneath. They are patio specimen trees, to be used singly for impact and given room to spread their low crowns.
Branching starts very low on the trunk. So to allow walkers to pass under, every one of these hundreds of plum trees has been pruned up by the maintenance crew. The work is constant, the resulting shapes are odd and the health of these hacked-to-death trees is not good.
Some wind up in a funny lollipop shape. Some wind up irregular and misshapen. Some survive only on one side, like the poor thing directly in front of our house, which is tilted because the sidewalk half is gone.
The stunted one at the foot of our driveway is never going to get big and round the way it should. It's been pruned so severely that it is in decline.
And when the flowers go by and the leaves come out, the whole neighborhood has long unbroken lines of dark purple trees up and down the streets.
But the early spring flowers are pretty, no question. What a lovely sight at the end of a brown winter. And winter in Santa Fe, with no snow and no rain has been very brown.
In between some of the purple plums another type of tree has been planted, a honeylocust, so there was an attempt to break up the monoculture at points. The honeylocusts leaf out much later -- you can see the bare branches near some of the flowering plums.
Until the honeylocust trees green up, the pink flowering plums are the whole show. And they truly are lovely, even if misshapen, in decline, and disastrously overused.
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