Evergreens: The Easiest Way to Have A Strong Garden Year Round
Posted: Wednesday, December 03, 2008
by Thomas Andrews
Park Seed Company
To improve the overall look of your garden and cut your workload in half, there are few better ways than planting a few evergreens. Reliably beautiful and low-maintenance evergreen shrubs can serve as the backdrop to your overall garden design. Whether it's a fragrant rhododendron hedge around the perimeter or a beautiful gardenia with huge blooms planted as a specimen right in the center of your garden, evergreen shrubs are perfect for any garden.
Evergreen shrubs stay attractive throughout the
seasons and add crucial architecture that anchors your garden design
as a complete composition. They make gardening easier because they are
reliable and, once established, fairly easy to maintain. Evergreen
shrubs are static fixtures that you can plan around. If you are
planting a privacy hedge with junipers or thuja, you create
soft, deep green, blank canvas that lends itself to themed gardens, like
Japanese gardens or English knot gardens if you add a few boxwoods
and other small shrubs. Your evergreen shrubs will ensure that your
garden is interesting all year long.Quick and Easy Evergreen Shrub Care Tips
Don't overcrowd your shrubs. Make sure you know how big they will
get before you plant them so you can give them proper spacing.- Make sure you have good drainage, and amend your soil as needed with good, absorbent organic material like peat or sphagnum down to about 10 inches.
- Use an organic mulch around the base of your shrubs to insulate the roots in during the cold months. If you use a good insect-repellent mulch like cedar, aspen or cypress chips, you will also have fewer problems to worry about in the warmer months.
- Water regularly at first, deeply once a week, to establish a strong root system. After a few weeks, depending on your particular climate and the plants you chose, you may not need to water again unless it gets really dry.
Most evergreen shrubs can be separated into two categories based on
their foliage. Generally, they are either broad-leaf or narrow-leaf
varieties. Broad-leaf evergreen shrubs like azaleas, gardenias, and
rhododendrons have broad leathery leaves. They often have big fragrant
blooms at some point during the season and tend to drop more leaves
throughout the year than narrow-leaf varieties. Broad-leaf varieties
need to be protected from the winter sun and wind, because they lose
more moisture than narrow-leaf varieties. The foliage of narrow-leaf
varieties, mostly conifers like Cypress, Pine, and Spruce, is more commonly referred to as needles. Conifers hold foliage for as long as two years. Some
leaf-drop is common for all shrubs, even evergreens, protecting the
plant from losing moisture that evaporates through those excess leaves.If your plant seems to be losing an unusual amount of foliage, it may not be getting enough water, or it may be getting too much wind and/or sun. All evergreen shrubs, especially those that are regularly pruned, lose their inner leaves as the outer foliage thickens. This is okay-it's like a landlord evicting a tenant who isn't paying the rent. Your plant isn't going to keep supporting leaves that aren't producing any food!
Thomas Andrews is a garden writer for waysidegardens.com.
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