Some folks trim their trees to make it easy to mow under. Others will want branches lower to pick the fruit easily. Your friend would have problems picking fruit off the tree in your photo.

I have a full size peach tree that is 3 years old. I have been trimming, mostly on the top and trimming so that the branches form long almost horizontal branches. It's about 7 foot tall and there are very few peaches that I won't be able to reach. Last year the tree produced about 100 peaches at two years old. It was a bare root tree shipped by mail from Stark Bros. The tree was a Hal-Berta and is on their web site as out of stock.

I also have a semi-dwarf peach that's 4 years old and has produced 20 peaches, about 10 in each of the last two years.

" I am assuming that height only increases as the tree grows."

Unless pruned off, branches will always remain at the height from the base of the tree where they first emerged. Any additional growth in the height of the tree will be at the top - the trunk itself does not elongate. Where a tree starts to branch is usually genetically determined.

Fruit trees in particular are most often grafted on rootstock used to control the tree size, among other things. Depending on the fruit, a semidwarf rootstock will keep the tree at about 2/3's its natural height, dwarf to about 1/2 the size and mini-dwarf even smaller than that. In all these cases, trunks are shorter, branching starts lower to the base of the tree and the overall size is reduced.

There is a limit to how small any dwarf really is, and the word often misleads people into thinking that the tree will always be small and cute, whereas its regular size counterpart might be thirty feet tall, and the dwarf might be 15'. In the end, 9 times out of 10, you're going to need a step ladder to harvest fruit from the upper parts of a dwarf tree. (Surely, there are going to be some exceptions.)

The branching on the tree in the picture will start at the "model's" chin once that tree is sunk into the ground. If it were any lower, it would be hard to mow under stand below, or get a ladder under for later fruit picking. If you want branching lower, you could cut the trunk off just above where you want the branching to start and it would quickly regrow new branches and top from that point. (You would never cut it too close to the graft union, but that would be down at its "ankles".)

I wouldn't personally consider buying that tree due to the number of dead sections.

Deer browse line is usually 5 ft

Wow, so much great information here. Thank you very much! Good to know about the dead sections too -- hadn't noticed that! I'm going to keep all of this in mind as I keep looking for the tree(s) for our yard. Thanks again!