Where can you find fall color in Texas? Start by planting these trees in your yard

This may not go down as a showstopper year for fall color here in North Central Texas. Drought and damage of recent cold winters have set our trees back. But a couple of species seem always ready to step up to bat, and they’re the two that I’ve chosen to feature today. One is common in area landscapes, and the other one ought to be.

Chinese pistachio

My first exposure to this tree was 50 years ago in a Metroplex landscape. It was a fairly mature specimen, and I guess someone must have seen it somewhere and brought it home for a trial. You never saw it in nurseries back then, and it certainly wasn’t being used to the extent that it is now.

Botanically it’s Pistacia chinensis. As the species name indicates, it’s native to China, but also to Afghanistan, Taiwan and the Philippines. You’ll find it sold widely in North Texas nurseries in containers ranging from 5- and 10-gallon-sized all the way up to large 200-gallon tubs. And, this is a great time for planting trees, too!

Chinese pistachio is rather gangly as a young tree, but it soon develops into a rounded shade tree as it grows into its mature size of 35 to 40 feet tall and wide. Its leaves are deep green and compound (many leaflets per leaf). They turn brilliant shades of red, orange, burgundy and yellow in the fall. In fact, few plants have any more dependable red fall foliar color.

Chinese pistachio trees are either male or female. The female trees will bear panicles of small red fruit. While inedible by humans, they’re favorites of birds. The cultivar Keith Davey was selected many years ago as being a superior male type that is propagated by grafting. While it’s difficult to find in the nursery trade, if you can locate it, it’s a means of ensuring that you’ll have a male, fruitless tree.

Since they have comparatively thin bark while they’re young, you need to protect the trunks of young pistachio trees with paper tree wrap from the ground up to the lowest branches. Without the wrap they will be subject to sunscald and subsequent invasion by borers. This is the same advice you’ll hear me giving relative to Shumard red oaks, red maples and other thin-barked trees. The paper wrap is flexible, able to expand as the trunk grows thicker. Leave it in place for at least 18 months.

I’ll close my sales pitch for Chinese pistachios as the North Carolina State University Extension website begins theirs: “Tough as nails, drought tolerant, easy to transplant and pest free are all terms used to describe the Chinese pistachio. This beautiful, medium-sized tree is perfect for both the home landscape and the urban environment.”

Ginkgo

No tree has any more beautiful yellow fall foliage than this prehistoric tree from China. It has some fun stories to tell.

If you allow yourself to look closely at a ginkgo’s leaves, you can rather imagine that it’s a broadleafed plant (leaves are not needles), yet its leaf blades do look like needles that have been fused together and pressed flat. And its fruit is a cone. Fleshy, but nonetheless a cone. So, in all those respects this tree appears to be a missing link between the gymnosperms (needled, cone-bearing plants) and angiosperms (non-needled plants with fruit that are not cones).

However, you don’t want a tree that bears fruit. Instead, you want a male, fruitless selection because ginkgo fruit smells terrible. Stick with a grafted variety like Autumn Gold, chosen for its lovely growth habit and fall color and for the fact that it’s a male selection.

I’ll take a little side trip and tell you how I know about the fruit. I grew up in College Station. There weren’t any ginkgoes there. My first two years in college were at A&M, but I transferred to the much larger horticulture department at Ohio State. I’d never walked through deep, wet snow, nor had I ever encountered a ginkgo tree. The first snowy morning on my way to my 8 a.m. horticulture class I slipped in the snow and slid through the ginkgoes. It was too late and too far to walk back to change clothes, so I got to wear that smell into a room filled with Ohio horticulture majors who knew full well where I’d been.

Even with that history with ginkgoes, it’s still my favorite plant for dependable fall color. I’m also fond of their dramatic V-shaped branching habits that become very visible in winter. We have three ginkgoes at our house. One is outside my home office window. One is outside our sunroom where we enjoy all our meals. And the newest one is alongside our driveway so we can admire it every time we come home.

I use ginkgoes as small accent trees. They grow to 25 or 30 feet tall in North Texas, but they are slow growing in getting there. As such, they’re great patio trees. They’re useful in small lots or along driveways. Mine are actually growing beneath massive pecans. They get very bright light but very little direct sunlight, yet they’ve been thriving for up to 30 years.

You can hear Neil Sperry on KLIF 570 AM on Saturday afternoons 1-3 p.m. and on WBAP 820 AM Sunday mornings 8-10 a.m. Join him at www.neilsperry.com and follow him on Facebook.

This story was originally published November 11, 2022 at 5:30 AM.