Winter is coming...

Not the season, the tree. When grandma and grandpa promised our baby a tree for Christmas, I knew exactly what kind of tree to get - a Winter King Hawthorn. A name that really does sound like it's coming right out of Game of Thrones. All hail the Winter King! I'd read about them in some home improvement magazine and they seemed perfect:

• Maximum heights of about 35 feet, so nothing too giant
• Robust and resistant to disease
• Generally able to survive owners with bad gardening skills
• Lovely white flowers in the spring
• Red fruit that birds love to eat in the fall
• Peeling silvery bark in the winter

Sounds perfect, right? Hawthorns usually have big thorns (which certain birds use to impale their prey) but I'd read that the Winter King didn't. That was a bit of a mistake - turns out they don't have the big thorns on most hawthorns, but they may have some:

"In addition to all of its beauty and ease of culture, ‘Winter King’ does not have the long, sharp thorns that its wild cousin does.  Although it is not always completely without, the thorns it may possess will be small and few.  So if thorns are your concern, do not be concerned with ‘Winter King’.  Although without the thorns, you won’t get the very cool loggerhead shrikes either."

Not a huge problem though because Hawthorns don't make good climbing trees. So the tree that arrived today, which is a true Winter King, does have some thorns, but not many.

Even better (for busy new parents) - grandma and grandpa paid for delivery and planting. The nursery arrived first thing this morning and got to work. We'd already figured out where we wanted it and used our local 811 service to make sure that we weren't at risk of bursting a pipe or breaking a power line. The root ball wasn't as big as we feared and we probably could have planted this ourselves, but it was nice to have pros do it and give me some tips along the way:

They checked with me to make sure the tree was oriented correctly (we set it so that the larger branches should grow out to the sides, parallel with the house and the street). They mixed compost in the soil as they planted it:

They showed me that we should keep this trough structure to be able to touch the root ball and assess dryness and also because it makes a well for water. In addition to the info sheet that we received, they walked me through all the watering suggestions (2 minutes of hose time each morning for the first 3 days, then 2 minutes of hose time during the hot summer) to help this hawthorn get established. Then they added some mulch on top (keeping the same trough structure):

 Ta-dah! This sweet little girl has her very own tree now!