Espalier Fig Trees: The Fan, the Belgian Fence & the Japanese Low Cordon Fad
Japanese espalier fig trees are all over social media right now: perfectly flat rows of figs trained along a wire a foot off the ground, every branch the same length, every fig hanging in a line. They’re beautiful. They’re also a system built for commercial greenhouses, but for most home growers, I think the low cordon is a fad.
I’m Ross, the “Fig Boss,” and I’ve dedicated my life to this amazing fruit since 2014. I grow hundreds of fig trees in the Philadelphia area, many of them planted 1 to 3 feet apart, so I’ve had to get creative with how I train and prune them. In this guide, I’ll cover the three ways to espalier a fig tree, the fan, the Belgian fence, and mostly the low cordon (Japanese espalier): the pros, the cons, how to create one, and why you might not want to.
Before you pick up the pruners, understand the one thing that makes or breaks an espalier: the hormones in your fig tree and how every cut changes them. It’s one of the most important guides on my site.
What Is an Espalier Fig Tree?
Espalier is the practice of training a tree to grow flat, in two dimensions, against a wall, a fence, or a series of wires.
There are hundreds of years of evidence of fig tree espaliers: trees trained as an edible, fruiting wall. It saves space, maximizes sunlight and air circulation, and simplifies harvesting. With figs, you’ll see three main styles:
The fan: four or five arms radiating from a short trunk, flat against a wall.
The Belgian fence: a row of closely spaced trees whose branches crisscross into a living lattice.
The low cordon (Japanese espalier, or stepover): one to a few permanent arms held horizontally, close to the ground, like a grapevine.
Fig trees will naturally grow as a bush with several trunks, and with training you can shape them into a tree or an espalier. If you’re still deciding on a form, start with whether fig trees should be grown as trees or bushes.
The Low Cordon (Japanese Espalier): Why It’s Trending
The Japanese espalier is a commercial production system. It’s not really meant for home gardeners.
Commercial growers in Japan grow figs in greenhouses, often under low plastic, which is exactly why height control matters so much to them. A low cordon keeps every tree the same short height, and it’s easy to prune, easy to train, and easy to teach a crew. The harvest is reliable and predictable, and the figs are big. For a business, that’s a great combination.
Why Figs Can Even Be Grown This Way
A low cordon works because the main crop forms on new growth. Every spring, the spurs push new shoots, and those shoots fruit the same season. The closest comparison is a grapevine. Other fruit trees can’t do this: peaches need last year’s wood, and apples and pears need spurs that are several years old. That unique flexibility is one of the reasons I grow figs.
The Permanent Arms Bank the Hormones
Here’s why a low cordon still fruits even though you cut it back hard every year: the trunk and arms are permanent. Over time, that old wood banks hormones, the balance that tells the tree to fruit. So even the one-year-old wood growing off those arms still fruits. It’s very similar to pollarding, where a tree is cut back to the same permanent framework every winter.
Generally, the older and more mature the structural base of your fig tree, the less likely you are to tilt the hormonal balance toward a fruitless tree. You can see it clearly in espaliered and annually pollarded fig trees. More in my guide to plant hormones in fig tree pruning.
How to Create a Low Cordon Fig Tree
A low cordon takes 2 to 3 seasons to set up, and then the same routine every year.
Grow a short trunk: start with a young tree and let it grow a single stem, then top it to form the cordon arms. You can have 1, 2, 3, or more arms.
Grow the arms upright first: let each arm grow upright until it reaches the length you want. No earlier.
Bend them horizontal: bend the arms down to about 6, 12, or 18 inches off the ground and tie them to a wire. Once they’re bent, they become fixed in place over 2-3 years.
Let the laterals come: in the 2nd or 3rd season, laterals grow off the arms. Keep one lateral every 8 to 16 inches per side. Your spurs can be on one side of the arm or both.
Cut back to spurs every winter: each year, cut every lateral back to a spur of 1 to 2 nodes.
Pick your shoots in spring: when the spurs push new growth, choose which shoots to keep and remove the rest.
Spacing matters, too. In my fig tree spacing guide, I recommend at least six feet between low cordons, which allows three-foot arms on either side within the row. Some growers space them eight to twelve feet apart. In a greenhouse, the length of the rows and the height of the roof decide a lot of this.
Tools: a good pair of bypass pruners does almost all of the work on a cordon. For thicker cuts on old arms and trunks, I use a pruning saw. The rest of the gear I use is in my Amazon storefront.
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Why You Wouldn’t: The Cons of a Low Cordon
Every winter, a low cordon removes almost all of last year’s wood. That’s the whole system, and it’s also the problem.
1. You Lose the Entire Breba Crop
The breba crop forms on the top 33% of last year’s wood. Cut every lateral back to a spur, and there’s nothing left for brebas to form on. If you grow varieties like Violette de Bordeaux, Green Michurinska, or Dalmatie, which produce an excellent breba crop, a low cordon throws away the earliest figs of your year. More in breba figs and the varieties that produce them.
2. Later Ripening
The more one-year-old wood you remove, the later the tree ripens, the harder it fruits, the lower the fruit quality, and the worse it lignifies before winter. On a low cordon, the main crop is delayed by at least 2 to 6 weeks, depending on the variety. In a long season, that may not matter. In a short one, it can be the difference between ripe figs and green figs at the first frost. See why figs don’t ripen and how much to prune fig trees.
3. Bigger Figs: a Pro and a Con
Bigger figs suit commercial growers, because big figs sell for more. For a home grower, bigger usually means more water in the fruit, less concentration, less drying on the tree, lower quality, more splitting and cracking, picking earlier, and more bugs.
As I always say, the best-tasting fig is the one that’s consistently the most ripe. More on what drives fig size in why some figs are small and others are larger, and on the varieties that hold up to rain in the best fig varieties for humid climates.
Where a Low Cordon Shines: Cold Climates
The one place I really like a low cordon for home growers is a cold climate.
Zone 7: your trees may not need protection at all. Still protect at least one tree as insurance.
Zone 6: wrapping may be enough.
Zones 5 and 6A: a low cordon close to the ground makes bending and covering it easy. The arms are already down there, so you can cover them with cardboard, mulch, tarps, insulation, or blankets.
Plan it early, though. Older trees are hard to bend. My full zone-by-zone method is in fig trees in zones 5, 6, & 7, and the wrapping method is in my guide to wrapping fig trees for winter.
The Fan Espalier
The fan grows flat against a wall with about 4 or 5 arms: two going up and two going down, in opposite directions. It’s my personal favorite, and the hardest to get right.
Ideally, each lateral grows 6 to 12 inches, and the tree grows a total of 1 to 3 feet per season. Here’s how I’d manage it:
Early on, prune more to lengthen the arms and fill in the shape.
Once it’s established, only tip the laterals or cut them back to maintain he desired length.
Avoid heavy cuts. Heavy cutting causes vigorous regrowth. Cut last year's wood back by 90%, you might cause it to grow 7 feet next year.
Remove the most vigorous laterals 100%. This prevents the formation of water shoots. Thinning cuts don't disrupt the hormones of the branches remaining on the tree. Each branch has its own balance.
Cycle out 2- to 3-year-old wood so there’s always young wood coming along. This is an alternative strategy.
Or use spurs, like a cordon, if you’d rather keep it tight.
A fan is hard. It takes arborist-level knowledge to keep it balanced, and you’ll make mistakes. But you’ll learn a lot about how a fig tree responds to every cut. Start with heading cuts vs. thinning cuts and the hormones behind them and shaping fig trees.
The Belgian Fence
The Belgian fence is the prettiest espalier of them all, and it ties right into how closely you can plant fig trees.
