With surprisingly timed summer flowers, hot fall foliage and handsome, peeling bark to recommend it, Stewartia pseudocamellia (top) is a treasure. It grows happily even in part-shade, and reaches about 25 feet here. Read its profile.
Perhaps the smallest tree I grow (maybe 5 feet tall and 9 feet across at present) is an oddball weeping Kousa dogwood, Cornus kousa ‘Lustgarten Weeping,’ which stirred some controversy at A Way to Garden when I almost sent it packing last spring, after years of non-love for it. I relented, and made it a proper home of its own, as you said you desired.
Another small Kousa, perhaps the best, is the variegated one called ‘Wolf Eyes,’just 6 or so feet tall and 10 feet wide. It’s like a beacon, even from a distance, with white-edged foliage and all the other kousa-dogwood traits: big white spring flowers, large red high-summer-into-fall fruits, and foliage that warms up as it prepares to fade and drop in fall.
I’m crazy about crabapples, with their springtime show but most of all their fall-into-winter fruit that the birds and I adore. My favorite red-fruited one (above), ‘Ralph Shay,’ is hard to find, with bright red crabapples big enough to poach. Among gold-fruited kinds, I like ‘Bob White,’ whose small yellow crabapples don’t get all brown and mushy, but mellow instead to a sort of butterscotch color; not gleaming, but nice Read more on awaytogarden.com