My townhouse garden doesn’t yield much in the way of evergreen trimmings for the holidays. So to cover these pots that hold coleus all season I snatched some juniper clippings from a nearby garden I adopted. The juniper parts still look good three months after they were cut, I’m happy to note.
I was happy enough with my juniper container until I visited the U.S. Botanic Garden last week and saw their conifer-filled containers. My only consolation is that my juniper clippings were free and my pots actually fit in my garden.
Nice contrasts in color, texture and habit.
There’s almost as much variety in this group of conifers growing in the ground. There were no visible labels, so who knows what they are or where they’re from – not me.
I wanted to see what we deprived Easterners have in the way of evergreen so next visited the USBG’s Regional Garden where I knew all the plants would be native to the Mid-Atlantic. I’d recently heard Dr. Linda Chalker-Scott, the famous Garden Professor located in Washington State, rhapsodize over the smell of wood chip mulch (her cause celebre) because in her area it’s so often made of pine. Ah, pines. Don’t see enough of them around here. (Source: Joe Gardener podcast, one of three excellent episodes about myth-busting.)
But look here – a gorgeous pine on the left. And, that’s it for conifers in this 5-acre garden, as far as I could find. But how about broadleaf evergreens?
Okay, here’s an American Osmanthus, something I didn’t know existed until spotting this one.
And what a shocker! A prostrate American holly called ‘Maryland Dwarf’!
A nice winterberry holly at its most colorful.
Finally, palmettos like this dwarf may be evergreen and native and all, but they don’t look like winter to me and sure aren’t something that invites touch. Like pine trees.
I may have been born on the wrong coast.
Pining for Conifers in Winter originally appeared on Garden Rant on February 1, 2018.
from Garden Rant http://ift.tt/2DZmJsY
No comments:
Post a Comment