Most people use their pots for posies – primarily petunias, geraniums, coleus, and other annuals that get planted each May and yanked each October. Then the pots get tucked away for winter until frost stops knocking at the door the following spring. Hardly anyone uses pots to grow woody plants – i.e. […]
Back when so many homes had exposed concrete-block walls, the first order of landscaping business was to plant evergreens the whole way around the foundation. The dark-green, hard-to-kill, soft-needled yew bush usually got the assignment. Box- and ball-shaped yews are so common around mid- to late-20th-century Pennsylvania houses that it seems as […]
There’s usually at least one suitable plant for any planting situation. But I have nothing to tell the guy who emailed me looking for an evergreen he can use to give dense privacy in the shade of his mature trees. Jim said he had tried interspersing ‘Green Giant’ arborvitae (an excellent plant) […]
It’s been a rough last two years for conifers, those cone-bearing needled plants that people typically call “evergreens.” The combination of hotter summers, bouts with polar vortexes in winter, excessive rains, our lousy soil, and increasing threats from assorted bugs and disease have killed a lot of pines, spruces, firs, hemlocks, arborvitae, and […]
Growing a Christmas tree is no easy feat, as you might’ve guessed from the troubles gardeners often have with their own backyard conifers. Here’s how the growers do it…
Don’t be too quick to give up on an evergreen that’s browning. Sometimes they’ll recover if intense heat was the culprit. But a conifer that’s brown all over most likely already has been dead for weeks.
At least 25 million cut evergreens will end up in American living rooms over the next 4 weeks. Some of them will look nicer, hold ornaments better and keep their needles longer than others. Which type makes the best choice? That’s open to some interpretation, but here’s a comparison of 8 species […]
No plants take more abuse in our yards than those foundation evergreens that we keep shearing mercilessly into balls and boxes. If that’s what you know as “evergreens,” you’re missing a whole wonderful category of textural, four-season plants.