This spiral garden that I designed a number of years ago has 3 Amelanchier trees in it. They are the white foamy flowering trees in the photos. A design challenge of this design was to integrate a created garden along the back woodland tree edge. How do you do it so that you don’t have a line of tiny plants and then tall 80′ trees behind them? The Amelanchier trees, or Shadblow or Serviceberry trees, are considered understory trees. They grow to about 20′ tall and in this design help to graduate the height of the big trees down to the shorter plants in the garden. They are that middle level of height – the glue between the woods and the shorter garden plants.
And for spring interest, they give an ethereal flutter of white. In the summer, their purple-blue berries are edible for birds and humans. They have lovely fall color and grey bark in the winter. All and all, the Amelanchier is a great native tree or multi-stemmed shrub for our area.
