Crabapples Add Curb Appeal

Crabapples add curb appeal to salt-box homes

By Amy McDowell

Two-story homes are immensely popular around the Des Moines metro area for one simple reason; homebuyers can get a bigger home for less money. They are much cheaper per square foot than ranch-style homes. After moving in, new homeowners struggle to landscape those boxy facades, and it’s common to see a ring of short shrubs (nearly always Spirea) around the home’s foundation. Unfortunately, that kind of landscape is out of scale with the size of the home and ends up looking chintzy. Some designers call that look “garnish around the turkey”.

A single tree in the front yard will aesthetically break up the tremendous bulk of the home and make it appear grounded. The tree’s canopy shouldn’t conceal the home in a dark leafy mass; it should be planted off center so it will not directly block the front door or any windows from the street.

Although a towering oak with rugged branches arching to shelter the roofline is the ideal tree for many reasons, oaks are slow growing and planted for future generations to enjoy. Go ahead and plant one, but you’ll also want to plant something that will grow faster. Plant an ornamental tree that will give your home curb appeal and help it blend with the landscape within a handful of years.

Crabapple trees are the best ornamental trees in Iowa. They are amazingly well adapted to our heavy clay soils and bitter cold winters. Tour the Arie den Boer Crabapple Arboretum at Water Works Park and you’ll see specimens that have survived many a flood. Trees that can survive floods are tough-tough-tough when it comes to living in clay soil. Crabapples bloom faithfully each spring in pink, white or red.

For 15 years, “Spring Snow” Crabapple was all the rage because it is fruitless. But being fruit-free isn’t all that important for the crabapple hybrids of today—they nearly all have tiny fruits that are retained long into the winter months. Mushy golf-ball-sized crabapples rotting in the grass are a thing of the past, thank goodness. New crabapple varieties are bred for rust resistance, too, so there no problems with ratty-looking foliage and late-summer leaf drop.

If your two-story home sticks awkwardly out of the landscape, plant a crabapple. They are hardy as heck, fast growing and beautiful bloomers.

Add a little curb appeal

Forays into the front yard

By Amy McDowell

The 100-foot tall honeylocust in my in-laws’ front yard was the tallest tree in their neighborhood. It had a trunk nearly 4 feet wide. It stood on the corner of their front yard and shaded their two-bedroom cottage for all of the 15 years they had lived there. Leafing out golden yellow in spring, it filled the sky with a light green canopy of dappled shade during the summer and showered the ground in the fall as tiny golden leaflets fluttered down like confetti. A wren house mounted on the side hosted a dainty couple and a new brood of hatchlings each season.

Then an October ice storm eight years ago brought the honeylocust crashing down in a shattered wreck of jagged wood and leaf litter.

Although devastated, my in-laws took little time to grieve. Ever anxious to keep a tidy yard, they sprang into action. They bagged leaves and twigs and piled branches on the curb for city yard waste pickup, hired one company to drop and haul off the decapitated trunk that had been left standing, and hired another company to grind out the stump.

While I was still mourning the loss of the tree, my mother-in-law was brushing the sawdust from her gloves and envisioning something new for her front yard. “I’d like to put in a new bed,” she said. “Something with a lot of color.” And off she went to the garden center. She returned with a tree, a half a dozen shrubs, some annuals, a concrete birdbath and a new wren house.

We hauled in three granite boulders and edged the two lower sides of the bed with stone pavers. My in-laws planted the ‘Autumn Sunset’ maple first, about five feet from where the honeylocust had stood. My mother-in-law hung the birdhouse on a high branch with the hope that her annual visitors would return to the strange new surroundings. Groupings of red pygmy barberries and golden privet fill the bed with color, and clusters of bright red annuals sing along the sidewalk. The wrens did return, and the birdbath drew crowds. My mother-in-law so enjoyed the activity through her kitchen window that she added a bird feeder.

Before their front yard venture, their neighborhood had nothing but garnish-around-the-turkey, home-hugging landscapes and driveway-to-driveway turf. My trendsetter in-laws were the first to break ground with an island bed in the front yard, but by the following spring, many neighbors were following suit and planting new front yard beds.

With this one bed, my in-laws added curb appeal, reduced their mowing and maintenance, attracted wildlife and began a new landscaping movement in their neighborhood. The loss of their immense shade tree ended up turning into something wonderful. “Yeah, it was pretty amazing,” says my mother-in-law.

Amy McDowell is an Iowa Certified Nursery Professional. She has a degree in horticulture and has worked in the field for ten years. She lives and gardens in Polk County.