How many trees.......

We have.
3 apple
1 pear
1 fig
1 olive
An enormous oak
1 tulip tree
I willow
I very large Acer.
1 laburnum
2 holly
1 Indian bean tree
And several large camellias

We are going to move the pear to a more sensible place soon. I think we have no room for any more

I only have a small suburban garden with

a cherry
a laburnum
3 conifers

Well if we weren't so silly about plastic, we would not now need to further deplete the rain forests and indeed ALL forests to make the m assive amount of paper bags, packaging and other stuff.

I was a guest at a huge dinner not so long ago and the 'cutlery' was stiffened paper. It may have worked for a piece of cake but for a mixed roast meats lunch it did not.

Now our landfills are stuffed full of paper bags we can't recycle (at least the ones I get simply tear as they are being unpacked)
No one seems to be collectng them to re-pulp.

Trees plant themselves in our garden and along the lane that leads to our house. I pull out dozens of sycamore, ash and downy birch seedlings every year. I've also pulled out a couple of dozen oaks that were growing too close to the house. Also some spruces. Nature really would take over quite quickly if left to itself. This, despite the nuisance, I find encouraging.

I've lost count of how many trees there are in the garden that I don't want to remove, but apart from the long-established ones there are half a dozen or so young oaks, ditto beeches, ditto rowans.

Might do a wee count today.

My garden is too small sorry. I have shrubs mostly.

Surrounding houses have their fair share of trees which look lovely in the summer.
I have a fir tree by the patio door, established bottlebrush and ceanothus shrubs which are tall and both attract bees when in flower.

Along the lane at the front there's a large rowan tree and horse-chestnut and over the fences are the overhangs of apple trees. Plenty of greenery about which I love to see then 5 minutes down the hill is the beach and the sea so plenty of fresh air too. A lovely place to live.

I have a courtyard, just under 3 metres by just under 5 metres, with raised beds in one of which is a coral acer. I have to bonsai it several times a year to keep it in shape.
So sadly just 1 tree and no room for more.

Can I ask a silly question?

Do bushes/shrubs do as good a job as trees, though obviously scaled down because of their size?

Assuming that they do, this should be talked about a lot more often, because I imagine a lot of people who don't have large enough gardens for trees - or are afraid of potential damage to their house from their roots or branches - would be prepared to put in a lot more bushes and shrubs if encouraged.

I have two birches, a rowan, an apple and two acers. I agree that large shrubs and small trees in pots count too. That adds two eucalyptus, a huge bay and several large lilacs. Then there's load of smaller shrubs and climbers. Added up, they exceed the foliage of the trees!

BradfordLass, I know you're in New Zealand, and I thought that they were pretty go-ahead about recycling there. However, my recycling bin is full of paper bags and packaging which goes to the waste separation plant along with all other recyclables. A mail order company which hitherto has sent my orders in plastic bags now sends them in tough paper bags which can be re-used and recycled. So I don't understand what you say about paper bags going to landfill. In the bad/good old days when we had coal fires, all our paper bags landed in the fire and our newspapers were used to set the fire.

Small back garden, 2 x hawthorn, one large mature beech which next door neighbour wants us to cut down because of the mess! - leaves and beech mast. Luckily it has been protected since the house was built in the 60s so no chance, as the tree officer has made quite clear to him.

Ornamental cherry in front garden - planted long ago by a former owner - which TBH I would happily get rid of and replace with a proper fruit tree with something to show for it after the flowers.
Preferably an apple - the prettiest blossom IMO.

We had more but two got ash dieback, they seem ok now they have been pollarded
Several more kept at reasonable height for a hedge ie about 12-15 ft.
3 fruit trees
A bay tree
One huge tree which needs inspection

There are many mature trees around and most of the leaves end up in our garden (and house) at this time of year.

Keep smiling!

Grass is also good at carbon capturing so the trend towards artificial grass should be discouraged imo.

We have several large shrubs and small trees in pots too and would be surrounded by forest if the squirrel had his way.

Everything helps

4 oaks, beech hedge, cherry

In our garden are;

One tall sycamore tree,
Three mountain ash
One pear tree
Two apple trees
One cherry tree.
Two small new plumb trees
Two magnolia trees.
A mock orange, very bushy and tall.

Every spring there are seedlings of mountain ash and sycamore sprouting in our gravel drive. As baggs says nature would take over if given the opportunity.

It is my personal opinion that the Sycamore will take over the world.
Didn’t think of leylandii as a tree, DUH?
However if I’m counting those we must have over 100 trees in our garden so:
3 silver birch
I pear
1plum
2 fig
I crab apple
4 apple
3 magnolia
1 prunus with lovely deep copper, peeling bark
1 pineapple tree, well that’s what we call it, it has lovely pineapple scented flowers but is quite tender so may have to go.
100 (at least) leylandii.

Am I the winner???

We moved here from a house with a small courtyard garden.
My DH still managed to get 3 fruit trees trained round the walls!
I love the birches, the bark looks lovely in winter. It needs a wash at the moment to get rid of the green tinge. Am I sad?

I’ve got

A Japanese Maple
A Holly tree
A Rowan
A Yew
A Bay
2 Japanese Cherries 1 is Amanagowa and the other is more shrub like Fuji Cherry.
A dwarf White Spruce
I also have a lot of shrubs, just thinking about buying a paper bush to replace a hydrangea that succumbed to the dry weather! It would be thriving at the moment if it could have just hung on poor thing.

Like many others, we have a lot of self seeded trees and some we leave in place, others we move.
Our house was built on part of an old cherry orchard and the garden had no trees at all back in 1973.
Now we have 6 holly trees.
4 oaks.
2 yews
2 silver birch
5 apple
3 maple
1 walnut
4 hazel.
5 conifers of various varieties
2 ash.
Lots of shrubs.
The garden is a bit messy and wild but we like it.

I would need to count ours - probably ten to twelve plus several acers in pots as we don't have the right soil but I love them.
As I'm currently sweeping-up fallen leaves the size of a plate from the fig tree most days I don't think we could cope with any more trees in our garden.
On a recent drive out to the countryside we saw a load of ash being cut-down due to die-back I suppose. Having already lost so many elm in the area already it does seem sad.

1 oak 2 prunus 2 eucalyptus 1 crabapple 1 deodar and I kept all the hawthorns and the ash in the old old boundary hedge.

MamCaz, bushes count too. I have a lot of ivy and it's good as refuge for the birds and bees. My garden is untidy and my dog thinks a hedgehog has a nest under the deodar/ivy mess.

Our house was home to three boys and a large dog when we moved in and the back garden was just grass with a climbing frame and goal posts - and a scraggy apple, a large bay and a fully grown walnut.

The apple died but the others are still there and we’ve added in total 14 more trees around the edge - and then there’s the shrubs. Its a normal sized suburban garden - there’s no more room!

Our front garden is only about 3 metres deep and is home to an enormous Scots pine which has a TPO on it. It really shouldn’t be there, dwarfs the house, blocks the drains, and makes the pavements slippy with needles and cones, but there’s no way we’ll ever be allowed to replace it with something more suitable. If you do plant trees don’t forget how big they’ll grow!

We have only one tree, a young plum tree, but when the estate we live on was built about twenty years ago, many very mature trees such as sycamore and maple were left as part of the landscaping (including fruit trees with old varieties of apples), and other trees were planted when the houses were completed. A recent house building scheme nearby doesn’t seem to include trees of any kind in the landscaping and the gardens are very small, so not really suitable for trees of any size. Like Baggs we have sycamores self seeding all over the place - in flower beds and growing up through existing hedges - and while one would like to leave them to do their stuff, their rate of growth is alarming and so it’s often not a practical proposition and they have to come out.