How to grow fruit trees in your home landscape

WASHINGTON Here's the lowdown for growing fruit trees as landscape plants.

Blueberries

The blueberry has it all: It's a native shrub with pretty white blossoms in April, delicious fruit in summer, stunning autumn leaf color and red twigs in winter.

Varieties fall into three basic groups: high bush, low bush and rabbiteye. Rabbiteye varieties are large shrubs favored in the South because they can stand hot, humid climates better than the other types. The quality of the fruit is not as high, though Mike McConkey, whose Afton, Va., nursery is called Edible Landscaping, said varieties and hybrids have been developed that are on a par with high bush types. "Columbus and Yadkin are really good," he said.

High bush varieties will grow in the mid-Atlantic, but you can't stick them in raw clay and expect them to survive. Blueberries have two basic requirements: an acid soil between 4.5 and 5.5 pH and, given their shallow roots, even moisture. Heavy soil should be amended with peat moss and rotted compost, which will help acidify the soil. Keep the root zone lightly mulched with leaf mold, screened compost, pine needles or sawdust. Water regularly when the plants are young and during periods of drought, but beware of over-watering or placing blueberries in waterlogged soil, which can kill them.

Timothy Wyant, a commercial blueberry grower in Wheatland, Va., has grown five early- to late-season varieties of high bush blueberries: Blueray, Bluecrop, Berkeley, Jersey and Darrow. Many of the shrubs are 30 years old and still bearing. "I have always mulched them with sawdust from sawmills, mostly oak, which is quite acidic," he said.

I think of low bush blueberries as occupying the frigid terrain of New England.

Blueberry bushes must be netted, or the fruit will be taken by birds. At his home in New Paltz, N.Y., Lee Reich, who wrote "Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden," grows blueberries in an enclosed pen, ringed with cedar posts that support netting. As the fruits begin to ripen, he places netting on top of the enclosure.

For individual bushes, gardeners can fashion temporary netted frames to cover a blueberry coming into fruit.

Brambles

Brambles, such as raspberries and blackberries, are inherently lax and twiggy, producing canes from suckers; I wouldn't place them in a prominent part of the yard. Reich, however, has tied the lankier blackberries up posts and pillars, as you might a climbing rose. Everbearing raspberries can be cut to the ground each winter. Other raspberries and blackberries require a different pruning regimen: At the end of each season, remove old canes that have fruited and thin out the new canes to allow the remaining ones elbow room for the following year.

If I had room for only one bramble, it would be the blackberry. Large, productive varieties have been introduced. McConkey likes three thornless varieties: Apache, Arapaho and Schultz. I have grown Kiowa, which is as tasty as it is huge, but it is wickedly thorny.

Juneberries

Juneberry is a name for a large deciduous native shrub known botanically as the amelanchier. Several species and many varieties have been developed, some for ornament and others for fruit, though all look good and are edible. Reich lists 13 varieties in his book and raves about the flavor of Honeywood, Moon Lake and Thiessen. I have a friend who rates highest the berries of a species named Amelanchier lamarckii.

Grapes

The key to success with grapes is to pick the right variety. Concord has its limitations, seedy and foxy as it is, but it is a reliable performer in our difficult climate, as is its white-fruited counterpart, Niagara. Corson trains five vines on the perimeter fence of her vegetable garden. Three are Concord, the other two of an unknown green variety. Three years ago, she went on vacation to Maine and returned to find that deer had eaten all the ripening fruit. The next year, she put netting over them and harvested 120 pounds of grapes.

The University of Arkansas has introduced a number of disease-resistant and seedless table grapes, including Mars, Jupiter, Reliance and Neptune.

If you are looking for an alternative to grapevines, kiwifruit and another species called the hardy kiwifruit offer dense, tropical-looking foliage and nice fruit at season's end, though you will need a male vine to pollinate fruiting female plants.

Persimmons

Both the native and very different Asian persimmon offer landscape plants that are attractive, glorious in fall leaf color and loaded with fruit in October.

The native tree is upright and narrow. Reich suggested choosing a variety developed for high-quality fruit. He listed, among others, Garretson, with a clear orange flesh; the large fruited Killen; and Szukis. The Asian species is a smaller tree but broader and with dense, glossy green foliage. The fruits are typically larger and include non-astringent varieties. I grow Fuyugaki, with orange-red, tomato-like fruits that set well without cross-pollination.

As with mulberries, persimmons are messy when they fall and shouldn't be placed near driveways, paths or patios.

Mulberries

Mulberry trees are generally disdained for littering and not being particularly ornamental as shade trees. But the fruits are sweet and loved by humans, other mammals and birds. The native red mulberry is, in maturity, a large tree. The introduced white mulberry is smaller but still a shade tree that reaches 30 feet tall. Many of the named varieties are hybrids of the two, including Illinois Everbearing, which McConkey commends for its flavor. The varieties Weeping and Geraldi Dwarf are far smaller than other hybrids and suited to smaller yards.

Reich says the best mulberry fruit is that of the black mulberry, which he keeps in a container to bring in during the winter. It is not reliably hardy much below 20 degrees. With a more balanced sweet-tart flavor, it's "perhaps the best-tasting fruit there is," he said.