The smaller the garden, the more you need plants to earn their keep. Look out for plants that follow a spring performance with another, different one in autumn. A cherry gives you a thrill early in the season when it covers itself in blowsy blossom, but then it sits for months, expecting praise for doing nothing at all. Crab apples and hawthorns look as splendid in fruit as they do in flower. And spindles, though not showy in spring, are magnificent as summer ends and autumn takes over.
The native spindle, Euonymus europaeus, favours chalk downland and looks spectacular just now with brilliant pink seed capsules that split open to reveal equally brilliant orange berries. They make small trees, not more than about 10ft high, and seem to grow in most garden soils.
E. planipes, from China, has bigger fruit than our native spindle, but they are made in the same extraordinary way. They hang on long stalks in little bunches, each fruit constructed of four sections like the overstuffed segments of a pumpkin. When the bright pink fruits split, the brilliant orange seeds shine out in thrilling, shocking contrast. ‘Red Cascade’ is the best spindle I’ve planted, a selection of the native one, with arching branches thickly covered with reddish fruit. The leaves also turn scarlet in an impressive last fling, before shutting down for winter.
Here are five more plants that can produce memorable displays of autumn fruit:
Rosa ‘Geranium’
A rangy, wild-looking rose that gets to about 12ft high, excellent when planted perhaps as a handshake between your garden and rougher ground beyond. The single flowers are a brilliant, clear red, each with a central powder puff of golden stamens. Even better are the hips, lovely flagon-shaped things, also bright red, which hang from the branches like decorations on a Christmas tree. When the birds have demolished them, it will be time to prune the rose, taking out one or two of the oldest stems each year. If you have room, you might also try the rose ‘Eddie’s Jewel’, which, like ‘Geranium’ has the species R. moyesii as a parent. The hips are big, fat globose things in bright orange-red.
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Iris foetidissima
The common name of this iris, the stinking gladwyn, isn’t much of a come-on, but it doesn’t really stink. It’s a good plant for a wildish part of the garden, making a solid clump of grass-green, spear-shaped leaves. In June it produces stems of flowers, muddy purple in the common kind, or pale lemon in the selected form citrina. The real point of this iris though are the glorious seedheads, which in early autumn burst open into three segments, revealing shiny berries the orange-red colour of sealing wax.
Once established, it will seed itself about harmlessly, doing very well in shade, even if it is dry. It looks tremendous hanging its brilliant berries over a carpet of dark ivy. Plant it now, setting the rhizomes about one and a half inches deep and working plenty of humus into the soil. Like most iris, it takes time to settle, but will then perform splendidly with little help from you. The seedpods dry well, invaluable for winter arrangements indoors.
Malus hupehensis
The great thing about the crab apple family (Malus) is that they pay top rent in a garden: excellent blossom in spring followed by good crops of brightly coloured fruit. They are also tolerant little trees. They’ll grow on chalk but are equally forgiving of clay. I’m keener on white blossom than pink, which leads me to ‘Evereste’ (white blossom and masses of orange-red fruit), Malus transitoria from northwest China or Malus hupehensis.
All are excellent, but the last one is perhaps my favourite. The fruit is just colouring up now and will drift through various creamy yellows to finish in a blaze of red. They are about the size of cherries, hanging thickly on the upright branches of a tree that will eventually, but slowly, get to about 40ft. In May it is thickly clothed in scented white blossom, tinged with pink when it first opens. The plant hunter Ernest Wilson, who introduced it in 1900, thought it was the best flowering tree he had ever found.
Viburnum opulus
The guelder rose is a vigorous shrub that scores on three counts: showy flowers, good autumn leaf colour and outstanding berries, born in clusters of translucent scarlet. It’s a tough survivor, with jagged foliage that turns pinkish-crimson in autumn, an excellent backdrop for the luminous fruit. The flowers come in early summer — flat white heads, a bit like those of a lace-cap hydrangea, the sterile florets surrounding a bobbly centre of small fertile flowers. Confusingly, the well-known snowball tree is also a V. opulus, but a different kind called ‘Roseum’. This will produce rounded white flower heads, great for picking, but it is sterile, so you won’t get any fruit.
Magnolia sieboldii
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I planted this magnolia not expecting its autumn fruits to be as eye-catching as its flowers. The first flowers appear in June, but it goes on flowering in an absent-minded way through the rest of summer. The critical point is that it misses the frosts that can ruin an earlier flowering magnolia overnight. The blooms are superb — creamy bowls with plush stamens of a tantalising purplish colour. And they are scented. So this beauty has more than earned its keep before you even get the surprise of the hanging fruit, each one about two inches long, a strange, soft, knobbly shape in a daring raspberry colour. The pink skin around the fruit eventually breaks open to reveal a cargo of bright orange seeds.
M. sieboldii is perhaps best planted as a multi-stemmed shrub, rather than a tree. It is by nature wider than it is high, but a multi-stemmed specimen presents both flowers and fruit just where you need them. You can see them, smell them, touch them all within easy reach. Like so many magnolias, it’s an eastern flower, native to Korea, southern Japan and parts of China. For underplanting it has, with us, just snowdrops.
