Espalier Apple Trees in Real Gardens: 7 Projects From Garden Bloggers

An espalier is a fruit tree pruned to grow flat against a wall, a fence or a set of wires. It sounds like something reserved for old walled estates, but plenty of home gardeners grow them on house walls, fences and porch railings. We went looking for gardeners who have written honestly about their own trees, including the squirrels, the patience and the pruning, and picked seven projects that each show something different.

Each entry links to the original post, so you can see the gardener’s own photos and read their full story. The photos on this page are illustrative stock images from Wikimedia Commons, credited under each one. They are not photos of the bloggers’ trees.

1. Miss Mustard Seed: Store-bought espaliers on a blank front wall

From Marian Parsons, Miss Mustard Seed: apple espalier tree update (original post)

Marian Parsons built two vintage-style trellises to break up a large blank wall of siding, then found ready-trained dwarf espalier apples at a big-box garden center. She grew them in large terracotta pots for the first summer while she cleared the bed, then moved them into the ground in early November and watched anxiously for buds the next March.

What makes this one useful is the honest timeline. Buying a pre-trained tree skips the first few years of shaping, and starting in a pot let her see how much the roots had grown before transplanting. She also notes that even a dwarf apple can spread wider than expected, so the trellis may need extending later. That is worth planning for on day one.

2. Garden Drama: A Zestar apple on a six-foot privacy fence

From Garden Drama: An espaliered apple tree is beautiful, fruitful, and surprise … E-Z to do (original post)

This gardener trained a ‘Zestar’ apple, a University of Minnesota variety, along a six-foot privacy fence in a backyard kitchen garden. The support is simple: eye-hook bolts in the fence posts, galvanized wire between them, and a turnbuckle at each end so the wire can be re-tightened each year. The first wire sits about 15 inches off the ground, with the next ones about a foot apart.

It took several seasons to get a real harvest, and squirrels took the first few apples. We like this post because it shows how little hardware an espalier actually needs, and it gives a realistic picture of the wait. The advice to start with a dwarf tree or a young unbranched “whip” matches what the RHS recommends for training your own.

3. The Art of Doing Stuff: A six-variety apple trained along a porch railing

From Karen Bertelsen, The Art of Doing Stuff: Growing a Flat Apple Tree: The Art of Espalier (original post)

Karen Bertelsen grows a flat apple tree along her front porch railing, and it is a multi-variety tree: each arm carries a different apple, from Gravenstein and McIntosh to Fuji and Royal Gala. Nurseries now sell these grafted espaliers ready-trained, which takes most of the mystery out of getting started.

A multi-variety espalier solves a real small-garden problem: many apples need a pollination partner, and space for two full trees is rare. With several varieties on one trunk, pollination is easier and the harvest is spread out. The trade-off is that the varieties grow at different rates, so each arm needs to be watched and pruned on its own.

4. My Productive Backyard: Five fence-trained apples and a 130 kg harvest

From My Productive Backyard: Bumper apple crop (original post)

This backyard gardener grows five espaliered apple trees along a fence. Together they take up about 20 meters of length, but only about half a meter of width, and they stand around 1.3 meters tall. In a good year they produced about 130 kilograms of fruit.

The numbers are the point here. A row of espaliers along a boundary fence uses ground that is often wasted, and it can still produce a serious crop. If you are weighing up one standard tree against a fence line of trained ones, this post makes a good case for the fence.

5. The Charming Nook: Two apples trained over a garden archway

From The Charming Nook: A fruiting archway for The Fruit Garden (original post)

This gardener installed a metal archway in her fruit garden and planted an apple on each side, ‘Golden Delicious’ on M9 rootstock and ‘Gala’ on M27, to be trained up and over until the branches meet in the middle. She explains why she chose such dwarfing rootstocks: her arch is only about 40 cm deep, well below the 80 cm usually suggested, so she needed trees that would stay small.

Rootstock choice gets less attention than it should, and this post explains it clearly. The rootstock decides how big a tree gets, and that matters more for trained forms than for free-standing trees. It is the same principle we cover in our guide to how big pear trees grow.

6. D. Venables: Stepover apples in the corners of a kitchen garden

From D. Venables: The creation of a 5 star bug hotel and planting fruit for the future (original post)

A kitchen gardener writing about the garden he looks after, Venables planted eight two-year-old stepover apples in the corner beds, including ‘Braeburn’, ‘Fiesta’, ‘Pixie’ and ‘Katy’. Stepovers are trained along a single wire about 15 inches above the ground. He planned to plant strawberries underneath.

A stepover is really a one-tier espalier, low enough to step over. It is the most space-efficient form of all, because it edges a bed without shading the crops behind it. Planting strawberries beneath is a smart use of the same ground. Expect a wait of a year or two for fruit from young trees, as he notes.

7. An Englishman's Garden Adventures: A six-year-old stepover under a front window

From An Englishman's Garden Adventures: Step-over apple Beauty of Bath (original post)

This blogger trains a single stepover ‘Beauty of Bath’, an old early variety from 1864, in a narrow bed under a front window. After six years, one end of the tree has crowded fruiting spurs with few flowers, and he plans to cut them hard back in winter to encourage new spurs.

Most espalier posts show the first year. This one shows a mature tree and the maintenance it needs: fruit forms on short side spurs, and old crowded spurs flower poorly until they are thinned. It is a good reminder that a trained tree is an ongoing project, with a summer trim and occasional winter spur pruning.

What these projects have in common

Every one of these gardeners used a dwarfing rootstock or a ready-trained dwarf tree, a simple wire or trellis support, and patience. Several lost early fruit to squirrels. None of them needed a stone wall.

If you want to try one, the RHS guides below cover the pruning in detail: shorten new side shoots in late summer and keep the main arms tied to the wires. Choose a variety suited to your climate, and check whether it needs a pollination partner nearby.

Top photo: Galen Parks Smith, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons