DEDICATED gardeners are regularly asked to name their favourite flowering plants.
If they are not specialists or breeders, I reckon most would express pleasure in virtually anything in bloom at any time.
I unashamedly love the bloomin' lot, although I do have a particularly warm spot for fruit tree blossoms.
Right now, our peaches, apricots and almonds have had their moment of glory, the withered blooms have dropped and the first tiny fruits are already forming.
Apple and pear trees are beautifully in flower at the moment.
I keep going out to simply wander among them, just to see, smell and feel the enchantment.
Strangely, one of our Granny Smith trees is in bloom, while there are three apples still hanging from last summer's crop.
I've deliberately left them there to see how long they will last. They still feel firm.
Pink lady apples can also hang and remain quite solid through winter, but as flavour deteriorates after the leaves fall, we try to harvest them around the end of June.
To a limited extent, most apple trees are self-fertile.
This means they can produce fruit without needing to be pollinated from another apple variety.
Unfortunately the amount of fruit produced from non-pollinated trees is fairly small, which is why it is always better to have one or more suitable pollinators nearby.
The bees go berserk zooming from one tree to another and, of course, carrying out the essential cross-pollination process.
This year our bumble bees have been out and about early.
No wonder they have black fur coats, they can still work blossoms, even if it is only a few degrees above freezing and raining.
Meanwhile, ordinary honey bees are still shivering within their hives.
All this pollination, plus some heavy spring rain, means our trees will be producing huge yields.
It is another reason why I'll never use bee-killing poisonous sprays.
Multi-graft apple trees are ideal for small gardens.
A single tree can produce several different varieties, depending on the number of grafts.
I once discovered an old apple tree grafted with 25 different varieties of apple.
Each grafted branch had a different growing habit and before pruning the tree looked quite weird and lop-sided.
Fortunately, many of the apple varieties cross-pollinated with each other so there was never any shortage of apples, right through from early January until mid-July.
Pears are the tricky ones when it comes to pollination.
Most pear trees definitely need pollen from another tree, although the odd solitary variety may still carry a tiny crop.
Luckily, any other pear variety in flower at the same time will happily cross-pollinate, even with nashi-fruit or oriental pears.
Unlike the blossom of most other fruit trees, pear flowers contain very little nectar.
Consequently, honey bees don't exactly make a bee-line towards them because there is so little reward.
In short, pear trees in bloom not only need a lot of busy bees, they also prefer to have at least one other pear variety flowering within range before they produce decent crops.
Many years ago I was working in a country garden.
The long drive was lined on both sides with pear trees.
When in full bloom they made the drive into the property an extraordinary experience.
Although the trees were more than 50 years old, the farmer's wife told me they had never borne any fruit.
That was because they were all of the same variety.
The following spring, just as the trees came into bloom I called around with several plastic buckets and masses of freshly cut beurre bosc blossoms.
After filling each bucket with water, the blossom branches were stuffed in and the blooming buckets hung them from some of the trees.
Never has there been such a massive crop.
The following March the ground under every tree was knee deep with fallen Williams bon chretien pears and millions of wasps were having a ball.
For some reason the owner never invited me back.
