nice beauty in fruit tree form.

  I  know that Paul wheaton does not approve much of nice beauty but if you think about it there are a lot of people who do, so if a thing you approve of is beautiful and you want others to get into it too, you might as well make something of its beauty. Nice beautiy is an expression of geoff lawton's i need a ppermaulture man who like beauty as a support forthis thread.
So here is a photo of the flower of a quince that has the most elegant of the flowers of all the fruit trees. 
    I have hung up another photo that shows its leaves. 
and below i am going to hang a photo or two of the frut of membrillos whih are golden and also it is a tree that has a good growth habit, that is, it grows into a pretty shaped tree.
it is a bit codl for it ieven in spain its fruit does not get to become sweet here so it only serves to make a jam with, Alabama or some much might have just the right climate for it. agri rose macaskie.

       Here is a picture of the fruit of the membrillo. ¿Does no one else have pictures of fruit trees that would encourage everyone to have these pretty and usefull plants?
        The membrillo seems to be very hardy, I have harldly had to water newly planted trees, i have two. I water this one so that it does not suck all the moisture out from the soil by the house and cause cracks in the wall of the house. A lot of suckers come up from its base.
       In spain apart from making a thick jelly jam like like paste out of the fruit, which jellly you eat with cheese, I should think the fruit is full of pectine which is good for your intestines, i think that because it makes a very solid jelly, you use the fruit in your cupboards to perfume them. agri rose macaskie

Here is a photo of sloes in flower of the whole village with sloes in flower in front of the village. Sloes the fruit are pretty too.
  I have included another photo here of a sloe hedge in a feild in autumn, it is prettier than sloes in bloom so if you want to prettfie your feilds this is one way to do it, all the signs are, twisted growth because the branches have been eaten they are not twisted in my garden, that sloes are fooder for live stock, goats here, they are all round the goat pen that is behind this hedge. So the sloe hedge is not just pretty in autumn, it is practiccal too if you keep goats maybe horses and donkeys too, and gives you sloes. agri rose macaskie. 

Those are beautiful pictures Rose.  I have never heard of this fruit but will look it up.

Rose

Thanks for the beautiful pictures. I support beauty as part of permaculture, and think we all do, as beauty is the one thing that is self-evident from the results of our work. What is your climate like (hi & lo temp extremes) and what other edible-bearing trees do well in your part of the world?

Bill

i love quince, we make quince cheese with it. which is pretty much a real hard jelly. delicious with cheese and cured meats.

its also good rootstock for grafting pears onto.

I found pictures of a couple of fruiting crabapples that are beautiful when in bloom (although I think all apple trees are lovely when they are blooming):  Redfield and Donald Wyman.  If you do a search for Redfield apple pictures and Donald Wyman apple pictures you should come up with them -- I'm not quite sure how to get pictures from a website onto my picture album so I can post them here.

Also, all the nut trees that I'm familiar with make really attractive trees.  Other than hazelnuts, they are usually larger than fruit trees, but make lovely big shade trees. 

I'm not quite sure how to get pictures from a website onto my picture album so I can post them here.

You right click your mouse on the photo then click on the address of the photo. The code will automatically be saved in the short-term memory of your computer.

Then in the box where you right your comments, click on the little photo of the picture (second from the right on top of the box) You'll get a code in your posting which looks a bit like this [imj][/imj] (Except I've replaced "g" with "j")

The cursor should be blinking between the brackets, if it isn't put it between them. Then you just press cntrl and "v" together and the code you copied will appear between the img brackets.

thanx

Au plaisir hvala.

The quince is so beautiful in it's "fuzzy" stage too.

The blackthorn bushes are full of sloes here at the moment. Their colour is really sumptuous and when seen from a distance give the bush a wonderful midnight blue haze.



This spring the crab apple still had some of it's fruit when it was full of flowers.



The tree stays red with fruit all winter and just a few little apples give you enough pectin for kilos of fruit when you're making jam.

 

very lovely pictures ..I have dozens of fruit trees and consider them quite beautiful

I did not get any notifications on this thread. I did not know any one had put anything in it so i found all the pictures at once which was a colourful suprise and realy it made me think fruit trees are not just pretty, they are more impressibve than I thought.

 bill_schulz, I live in about the middle of Spain so about New York level, and the garden is a bit above a thousand metres over sea level, so it is cooler and wetter than other spots in Spain, except Spain is pretty mountainouse so there must be plenty of spots that high up. I read that quinces ripen, actually sweeten and maybe get juicy in more southerly places. here they never sweeten, however they do fruit much further north than this, i think you can grow them in England though i have never seen any, people seem to be conservative about fruit trees and spend money on other decorative plants, that is a reason for putting in photos of fruit trees if you think it would be cool if more people owned them.
    The winter low temperatures are often below freezing  but though the garden is at a pretty high altitude the ground never freezes hard and stays frozen all day, as it used to do in Cheshire where my grandmother lived,  sad, no skating,  but we get late frosts which means that delicate plants get all through winter and then get killed by a late frost. I dont know why, late frost are so deadly but I imagine the plants start to drop all their cold weather protection gambits in spring and then a late frost catches them unprotected. So if you grow delicate plants redouble your efforts to protect them through the spring.
     The soil was very poor when i bought the garden fifteen years ago, it is better now but still vegetables dont seem to find it very exciting. Maybe, had i kept animals to manure it, impossible i am a weekender and grown trees of the leguminouse family and cut and dropped their branches for mulch, the soil would have improved that much quicker but though i was into organic gardening i knew nothing about permaculture then. I think the poverty of the soil has been the biggest problem.

Irene knightley my quinces are never that fuzzy and cute, paul wheaton will really be sick if i talk about fruit being cute. What sort of quince do you have? The english site i have started buying apples with give three different types of qunce but i have only known this site for about a year. they dont say which are fuzzyest. i like the cute well enough to buy a tree i absolutely dont need just to get it, maybe thats just stupid, extravagante. rose macaskie.

rose macaskie wrote:
paul wheaton will really be sick if i talk about fruit being cute.

Below an enthusiastic baby peach tree (it actually set fruit!) and a baby chestnut...

Brave little thing setting fruit at that age !!

I've loads of little peach trees I've grown from seed but I always take the flowers off for the first few years until the branches are strong enough to cope with their heavy load. (I sometimes get that wrong!) This year the crop was exceptional and I've been making peach everything. Next year there should be enough to make eau de vie.







Rose, I've got two quinces - a very old one and a very young one which I bought as Cydonia oblongua. I think it's called the Portuguese Quince. They're very much a "forgotten" fruit here - I don't know of anyone else who has a quince tree.

The fruit are pear-shaped and have a really wonderful perfume which lasts in the house for about a week. They're hard as rocks.



I make chutney from them mostly and when I've the time, I make paté which keeps for ages until I cut it into chunks and then dip in melted dark chocolate...

Irene, those peach trees are lovely. I have two that dont often fruit, like once in fiften years and this year, they were planted in the bit of the garden that is sandy, there is a small bit of garden with sandy soil and other bits that  have sand stone in the soil, not by me but by the former owner, as peaches trees like sand i suppose and they have only fruited when given manure, and do better if i have the compost bin near them. So they might like sand but it seems it does not hold half enough nutrients for them. Nearly none of my fruit is ripe till October neither the peaches when they appear, nor the apples which are the only thing i have an abundance of, i inherited apple trees from the former owner, then i have only been into fruit for the past year, permaculture turning me into a person who tries to be a food producer instead of just someone with a garden and more seriously, a great interest in bettering soil to prove it could be done. 

   Your trees make me want to try again with other peaches in a less sandy bit of garden. I would like to have a quince chutney recipe, the stuff in the jar in your photo looks like the spice peaches recipe i have, in which you cook the half peaches gently in vinegar and sugar and water and spices and then do the same again next day which gives you peices of peach you can put on to your plate to accompany meat rather than a jam like aglomerate of fruit that i usually identify with chutneys. I only try to make chutneys every so often, once every ten years appoximately. My chutneys are never very good, I usually make up the recipies for my chutneys.
    I tried stewing the quinces last year and then freezing them to eat as stewed fruit with yogurt and sugar sprinkled over and the first lot were very good like that and I over cooked the second lot or cooked them with too much water. I stewed them without any sugar so i could add that later and suprisingly they were very sour.  Stewed quinces have a slight strange musty taste about them along with their normal fruitynes acid qualties that is a experience I enjoyued. I used to cook a lot and now i write a lot and don't pay enough attention to cooking which is not so good if i am going to grow a lot of fruit.  and-:
    That beautifull pumpkim, my efforts at growing food are an absolute disaster at the moment, i tried growing pumpkins and all the plants died, then all there is of me is the quiet me accustomed to not suceeding at first looking a the bare patch of ground I put seeds into. there was a time when i could not keep a house plant alive but now my balconies are covered in plants i expect to manage to grow food one day.

havla that photo of an opening quince flower is absolutely beautiful. agri rose macaskieT

Jeanine Gurley quinces are famouse because of Edward Lears poem, The Owl and the Pussy Cat that most english children know. One set of lines in it goes, "and they dined on mince and plenty of quince that they ate with a runcible spoon and danced by the light of the moon. That was in the land were the bong trees grow which i have read was meant to be the island of Corfu in Greece and the greeks certainly make quince cheese so that makes this likely as not true.

Talking of fruit trees and Corfu and i have only thought of it now, i did not plan this matching up of themes. I suppose olives are fruit trees and in Corfu they let them grow tall, it is the land of the bong trees and i loved the olive groves there, they seemed very beautifull to me though in this photo the olive trees look more interesting than beautiful, though i remember finding them beautiful.
    The tiny reflective hairs that make the underside of their leaves white, when they aren't reflecting some other colour, i imagine the point of havign reflective leaves is to reflect heat and so keep cooler, gently reflect the colours of whatever is facing them, the sandy coloured ground for instance, making the leaves all slightly different colours and that is what i identify as one of the reasons that olive trees are so attractive from close too. I went on holidays abroad before i got married. These trees are on the edge of the sea that you can more or less see beyond the trees I am not giong to prune my oives in memory of this place. How do they pick the fruit? I was told they put sheet under the trees and just waited for the olives to drop in january if i remembe right and then colleted them. THe olive oil there was very good so this late  harvest does not effect the olive oil. agri rose macaskie

  Talking of olives and beauty, and at the same time to talk about hazel nut Kathleen Saunders mentioned. The colour of olive leaves is attractive, its greyness contrasts with other gerens of winter  and i always thought hazel nuts weren't attractive till i saw them in winter and then i decided they were a very decorative tree just what the doctor ordered among all the grey of that season. It was the scene of the second photo i post here that made me think they were very decorative in winter.
The first picture features the torquoisy green of a small olive tree and in front the catkins of a hazel, in this case a decorative one with curly twigs.
the second photo is of a whitchhazel in the fore ground that flowers in winter and a normal hazel in the distane with its yellow catkins. apparently you can eat the seeds of whitch hazel that must mean hens can too so it has a use though the truth is i bought it for its flowers and with the added thought of its skin alming abilities to excuse such a buy also permacuture is meant to include all sorts of plants, as you never know what virtues for other plants they might have and as monocultures are always a problem so diversity is a good thing. I now have a lot of apples on the slope too.  agri rose macaskie.

whitchhazel in the fore ground that flowers in winter and a normal hazel in the distane with its yellow catkins. apparently you can eat the seeds of whitch hazel that must mean hens can too so it has a use though the truth is i bought it for its flowers and with the added thought of its skin alming abilities to excuse such a buy

I don't ever feel the need to excuse such trees. Taking care of your skin means it's healthier and healthy bodies are beautiful bodies. In the same way that a healthy tree or a healthy plant is beautiful.

I only noticed how beautiful Hazel trees were last winter when the young ones I planted started to make a lovely fan shape. I have one red hazelnut tree with leaves and fruit which are quite spectacular ;



Another small tree with beautiful little flowers is the Nanking Cherry (Prunus tomentosa thunb.)