Fruit Tree Sizes

The size of our fruit trees varies greatly but it is very likely that your young tree will, once established, usually overtake a newly planted older, larger tree after a few years, which is likely to suffer much more with transplanting stress than a young tree.

Apples and Pears

A one year old maiden apple tree may be between 50cm and 180cm in height. This is due to variations in the vigour of different varieties (some older heritage varieties are just slower growing i.e. D’arcy Spice), the vigour of different rootstocks and the whims of the weather over the growing season (i.e. in the 2021 growing season, the extremes of cold and dry weather in April, then exceptionally wet weather in May has left all our trees about 1 foot shorter than we would expect) . The minimum height of our one year old apple and pear trees is 70cm unless stated otherwise. Any larger one year old maidens will be pruned back to the appropriate height (for their rootstock) to form next years branches.

Plums and other stone fruit (Greengages, Damsons, Cherries)

We have two types of grafted stone fruit trees for sale, bench-grafted and budded. The bench grafted trees will follow the same kind of growing pattern as the apples and pears, having a similar growing season from grafting to lifting of about 9 months. Budded trees are usually much larger at one year as the grafting process actually takes places over 2 years. Because of their larger size these trees are carefully pruned back to a maximum height of 150cm for ease of handling. This allows you to choose your specific pruning height later in spring to establish various forms such as fan trained or open centre.

Quince trees

These are usually budded (see plums and other stone fruit above), and are so often so vigorously large, heavy rooted and branching that they are not suitable for sending by post, but available for collection only.