Alder trees
Alder is a beautiful tree for adding height, structure and winter interest to your garden with attractive catkins and coppery-orange winter bark colour. It has leathery, dark green or golden, racquet-shaped leaves with serrated edges and rounded, indented tips. Flowers are on catkins, which appear from late winter into early spring. It produces both male and female catkins on the same tree with pendant male catkins and green, oval-shapes female catkins in groups on each stalk. Alder has a conical growth habit with fissured, dark brown bark and sticky new growth. Suitable for growing as a tree or incorporated into mixed native hedging, it will cope with boggy parts of the garden - in fact you’ll often find alder growing in moist ground near ponds, rivers and lakes. One of the best varieties to grow is the golden-leaf Alder (Alnus Glutinosa ‘Aurea’) which has pale yellow leaves and rarely exceeds 4 metres in height. A much taller species is the Italian Alder, Alder Cordata, which is best known for its glistening leaves and large cones. Not suitable for chalky soils.