Ornamental trees are specially selected varieties of trees that are selected to provide the landscape with impressive and fascinating hues of reds, oranges, blues and greens, along with unique shapes and sizes that fit the desired look of the garden. And one of the popular choices for ornamental trees that you can plan in your own yard are Japanese maple trees.

The Japanese maple is an amazing tree of beauty and grace and due to their startling colors, wonderful leaf shapes and relative ease to grow they’ve become one of the most sought after ornamental tree by both professional and amateur landscapers. And as you’d expect there are a huge number of different varieties of the Japanese maple tree, giving it a great versatility in how it can be used to create spectacular landscapes.

Unlike many other commonly available types of ornamental trees, it is possible for a home gardener to grow Japanese maples from seed relatively quickly and easily. The two most commonly available types of Japanese maple (but certainly not the only ones) are the red variety and the green variety. These are two distinct varieties of maple, so don’t plant the seeds of a green Japanese maple and hope to get red leaves! Green maples have green leaves that last from spring to late autumn, while the startling color on the red maple trees unfortunately fades during the course of the year. However the vividness of the red leaves returns during the next springtime.

The laceleaf weeping variety is another unique type of Japanese maple tree. In appearance it looks like a combination between a red maple and a weeping willow. The laceleaf weeping variety grow to a relatively short height but can give your home and garden an absolutely stunning look. As you’d expect from the name the foliage on the laceleaf weeping Japanese maple is soft and thin, which gives it the lacy appearance from it’s name.

If you want an impressive flowering tree to add that perfect touch to your landscaping job around the home, you certainly can’t go past the crabapple tree. No matter where in America you live, crab apple trees give a unique and beautiful look at almost any time of the year.

Like most flowering trees you can buy, spring to early summer is undoubtedly the time when the flowering crabapple tree looks it’s best. The trees multicolored buds begin to open, revealing a multitude of brilliantly colored flowers that last for many weeks. As the fall months arrive, the flowers of the crab apple tree begin to disappear and the fruits begin to form. These fruits come in as wide a variety of colors as the flowers before them. Usually the colors of the fruit on the crabapple trees mimic and contrast perfectly the changing colors of the leaves for autumn.

Most crab apple trees begin to bloom between late April and mid May. It’s at this time that they begin to produce their characteristic flowers with as few as five petals, or as many as fifteen or twenty petals. Generally speaking, the more petals to the flower the flowering crabapple tree has, the longer the tree will keep that flower. But the longer flower does have a downside for the gardener. Crab apple trees that keep their flowers for a long time produce far less fruit during the autumn months.

Rather interestingly, the crabapple tree is actually part of the rose family of plants. If you examine the flowers closely, this relationship becomes much more obvious through the similarities of the flowers. But as its name suggests, the crabapple tree is still closely related to the standard apple tree. The major defining difference between the two is in the size of the fruit.  Crabapples are less than two inches in diameter, while regular apples can be any size larger than two inches in diameter.