In winter, nothing quite matches ornamental bark for its intensity of colour. Red, copper, orange, black, white, yellow — you name it, it’s there. Even the detail can be beautiful: perhaps a speckling of coppery dots and horizontal dashes (the lenticels, through which the trunk breathes) or great sheets of bark flaking away as the wood slowly expands.
The white-stemmed birch (Betula utilis var jacquemontii) must be the most popular. Time was the golden leylandii came top, and later Robinia pseudoacacia ‘Frisia’, a tree so golden that you can spot it, obvious as blue swimming pools, from a plane. Now it’s the day of the white birch. Our native silver birch is wonderful in old age: the criss-crossed black stretchmarks at its base, the fine tracery of branches.
But if you want shocking whiteness on a young tree, then Betula utilis var jacquemontii is the one. It’s not the colour alone that makes it so appealing: it’s the colour combined with vertical geometry that makes it such a commanding focal point at the end of a path or lawn.
Why settle for a single white trunk? Be brave and put in a trio, planted a couple of yards apart to add weight to the effect. Don’t just plonk them down in grass either; try them in gaps in paving to shade a patio, or in a crisp gravel garden, or even as incidents in a wide gravel path. You could make a close little grove of half a dozen with a bark path winding through it and snowdrops, snowflakes or Pulmonaria ‘Sissinghurst White’ underneath.
The very whitest barks come from the named forms of B jacquemontii, such as ‘Grayswood Ghost’ and ‘Jermyns’, which have to be grafted onto ordinary birch stocks. Usually, they are sold on clean 6ft trunks, which are fine for formal situations, but you may prefer to buy birches as waist-high whips so you can nip out the top and encourage them to develop a more irregular, relaxed shape: multi-stems perhaps, or three planted in the same hole.
The black-stemmed bamboo (Phyllostachys nigra) is almost as popular as the white birch, and they go very well together. Black stems never stand out on their own, but they do make a good contrast alongside pure white. So do red stems, and it’s most effective to plant the white birch rising from a forest of red dogwood stems (Cornus alba ‘Sibirica’). If you want real subtlety, try white birch and black bamboo in a sea of black dogwood stems (Cornus alba ‘Kesselringii’).
But life is not just black and white. There are wonderful orange and copper barks, too, usually brightest on the youngest twigs. If you plant a screen of limes along the west side of the garden and prune them hard to a framework every year, then the low evening sun will light up the young twigs on winter afternoons. Tilia cordata ‘Winter Orange’ is one of the best, and Tilia platyphyllos ‘Rubra’ is orange, moving to dark brick-red.
In less formal situations, or by water, willows are a good choice. Salix alba ‘Chermesina’ produces wands of a coppery orange, while the variety vitellina is golden yellow. Both can be pruned back hard every year to the top of a trunk or to the ground, to make an explosion of slender, waving stems. For black-lovers, ‘Blue Streak’ is the willow to go for (it has a blue- white bloom on top of chocolate bark).
If it’s yellow and green stripes you need, then plant the bamboo Phyllostachys aureosulcata ’Spectabilis’: a dreadful name for a wonderful plant. Thinning out the stems to a few inches apart lets the light in and makes the best colours. In a big garden, you might try the yellow-barked variety of common ash known as ‘Jaspidea’. It’s a gentle, pale yellow, so it doesn’t look out of place in the country; even its autumn colour is that little bit yellower than the common ash.
For a bark that’s brown but in a league above the rest, you need to plant Prunus serrula: it’s a cherry tree with pleasant enough white flowers, but it has the most glorious, shining mahogany-brown bark you will ever see. House-proud gardeners buff it up from time to time with a cloth to remove green algae, and in a good specimen you can almost see your face.
The bark of the little maple Acer griseum has less glitz but, with time, it develops shreds and rough flakes of a glorious orangey-brown. If you want shrieking pinky-brown, then plant Arbutus menziesii, the madrona. It’s not reliably hardy, especially when young, but in a sheltered garden it will settle down and be tougher after a few years.
There are other ways of having coloured trees in a garden. Last year, I passed a small Day-Glo orange tree on a countryside railway embankment. To all intents and purposes it was plastic, a dead tree wrapped tightly from head to foot in orange bomb-tape. Why? The next day it had gone.
It was probably art, although not what you’d expect to find in the middle of nowhere in north Wales. But if Christo and Jeanne-Claude can wrap the Reichstag in Berlin in plastic, why not wrap a tree in Wales? Gardeners get up to all sorts of things. I have a 9ft “silver tree” made of galvanised steel rod. It moves around the garden according to whim, last year spending the winter outside the kitchen window baubled with a single nutmeg and golden pear and — for devilment — a rubber snake slithering up the trunk.
When a cherry tree died and dropped its leaves days before an organised visit to his garden, Andrew Lawson, the garden photographer, decided he would paint it blue from top to bottom rather than try to take it out (a huge job). The tree is now infamous in the gardening world and appears in many a book on garden design. A few years on, the cherry is literally dropping to pieces and Lawson’s Blue Tree (Tracey Emin, he got there first) is for the chop. But it was fun while it lasted and, actually, it was a good, bold anchor for an enclosed, sophisticated garden.
Clive Wakeford, an environmental artist from Colchester, Essex, spent 2005 busily painting trees. He regards them as “a commentary on the environment, agricultural changes and the regeneration of found objects”, and recently painted white a 50ft oak tree near the A120 outside Colchester. It must have slowed the traffic better than any police camera. Wakeford takes his “arborgans” very seriously. He has taken his brush to abandoned espalier apple orchards, haggard, decapitated old trunks, trees outside pubs and trees at the Royal Horticultural Society’s garden at Hyde Hall in Essex. And why shouldn’t we gardeners just experiment a little? Blue, red, pink? Spirals, maybe? Chequerboard? One silver-spiralled bamboo stem among a grove of green? After all, none of this is permanent.
Tree-dressing is nothing new or even peculiarly British. It is done as far afield as Japan, Mexico and Pakistan, where trees are often hung with lights, garlands, food and clothing. It has a long tradition, since dressed trees are frequently symbols of fertility.
Unfortunately, painting a tree seals its breathing apparatus and will most probably kill it, so save this method for dead or abandoned trees. Maybe gardeners should consider not ripping out trees the minute they die, but start to make something of their architecture for a few years longer instead. Maybe we should lose the “dead is bad” mindset. We could certainly make some very white-stemmed birches.
Caring for coloured bark
Birches with white or remarkable bark
Betula albosinensis var septentrionalis: grey-pink, turning coppery with age; Betula ermanii ‘Grayswood Hill’: white; Betula nigra: pinkish, shaggy; Betula papyrifera: white, papery; Betula pendula (silver birch): coarse black and white diamonds at the base of old trees; Betula utilis var jacquemontii ‘Jermyns’, ‘Inverleith’ and ‘Grayswood Ghost’: chalk white
Specialist tree suppliers
BlueBell Nursery, 01530 413 700, www.bluebellnursery.com; Highfield Nurseries, 01452 740 266, www.highfield-nurseries.co.uk; Langthorns Plantery, 01371 872 611, www.langthorns.com; Madrona Nursery, 01233 820 100, www.madrona.co.uk; Pan-Global Plants, 01452 741 641, www.panglobalplants.com; Clive Wakeford, 01206 845 275, www.clivewakeford.co.uk
