These types of trees can add layers to your landscape. Here is our quick quide to beech, birch & ginkgo biloba from our gardening experts.
Shade Trees are large deciduous trees with broad, leafy crowns (leaves and branches) that provide space beneath its canopy. Shade trees can grow to more than 50 feet tall when fully grown. You will find shade trees, such as Beech, Birch, Linden, Locusts, Maples and Oaks in the woods, as boulevard trees and in most yards. Some of the more popular examples of are listed here.
Beech (Fagus sylvatica) – European Beech trees are classed as a shade tree for height, but they are so spectacular you will think of them as ornamental. Many of these legacy trees are columnar in shape but provide some shade in the summer especially when planted together. Fantastic as specimen trees providing 3 seasons of colour. They are long-lived trees and slow to medium growers at 12” to 24” in height per year.
Birch – One of the most beautiful shade trees, Birch trees are also very cold hardy. Birch trees are noticeable from their light coloured, peeling, papery bark and triangular leaves that turn yellow in fall. Birch trees have many varieties that grow as a classic single trunk or others that are clumped in multiple stems.
Ginkgo Biloba
Ginkgo Biloba, also known as Maidenhair trees, have uniquely fan-shaped leaves that start out green but change to golden-yellow in the fall. The common name “maidenhair” was inspired by the fan shape of the leaves, which reminds people of the maidenhair fern whose leaf segments are also fan shaped. Maidenhair trees can be quite large growing 50 to 80 feet tall & 30- to 40 feet wide at maturity. The bark on older specimens of the tree becomes deeply furrowed. A very interesting specimen tree particularly because of their golden fall foliage.
