PLANT THESE 7 EVERGREENS NOW FOR WINTER
If you want a beautiful yard with lots of color, texture, and visual interest, but you want to keep it low-maintenance, evergreens are your best friend. Evergreens, really? Trees that are always green all the time?
Yes, evergreens, really.
No, your landscape won’t look monochromatic and monotonous.
There is actually a shocking amount of color variation available in evergreens. Green is a very dynamic color, and there are so many different shades of it. If you put them all on a color spectrum together, there are plenty that would fit better in a yellow spectrum or a blue spectrum than in green. There are also many benefits to having evergreens in your yard.
This is the perfect time of year to add evergreens to your landscape. Being moved to a new location and then planted is a bit stressful for plants. Planting in the fall or spring reduces stress on the plant because they’re exposed to more moderate temperatures, less intense sunshine, and usually more rain.
CAN I PLANT EVERGREENS IN CONTAINERS?
One of the more recent trends we’ve noticed is that people are wanting to grow evergreen trees and shrubs in containers. It looks beautiful, and it can really take the elegance of your patio or yard up a notch. Its formal and tidy, and the choices for container styles are endless, so you can really tie them together with the season or the style of your home.
There is only one problem with planting evergreens in pots: Indiana winters. It’s not necessarily the low temperatures that are the problem, but the freeze and thaw cycles that present the risk of destroying your container shrub’s roots. You can grow evergreens in containers in Indianapolis, but you’ll need to give them plenty of extra winter insulation to protect the roots.
The best way to protect your potted evergreens in winter is to sink the pot (as long as it has drainage holes) into a hole in the ground so that about 1-2 inches of the top of the pot is sticking out. You could also bury the pot in a pile of compost. Water them well, then give them a thick layer of mulch, and let them be. If you can’t sink them in the ground, you could also bring them into an unheated garage or shed. Just make sure to set the pots up on a few wood chunks, so they’re not standing on a cold concrete floor.
If you can’t sink them into the ground, or put them in a shed or garage, wrap the pots with bubble wrap and horticultural blankets. Don’t ever wrap the entire tree in plastic, though, which can trap moisture and cause rot. Once they’re wrapped, move them all into a sheltered corner right against your house. Pushing them as close together as possible will help them shelter each other. If you want to give them extra protection, you can stack some small hay or straw bales around them to keep the wind away from the pots.
Spraying all of your evergreens, potted or not, with an anti-desiccant spray, like Bonide Wilt-Stop, which we carry at Dammanns, will also help protect them from winter kill.
6 EVERGREENS TO PLANT NOW
Boxwood is one of the most timeless and classic evergreens. We usually think needles when we hear evergreen, but boxwood is a broadleaf type. It features small but shiny green leaves and is an excellent option for large or small hedges or for creating topiary. There are many different kinds of boxwood, with quite a range of different shades of green available.
Blue Princess Meserve Holly is also a broadleaf evergreen, but with relatively large leaves and gorgeous bright red berries. The leaves of Blue Princess feature the typical spiky serrations of holly but in an icy-blue-green color. They do require both a male and a female planted close together to produce the berries.
Green Luster Japanese Holly has a totally different look. Its leaves are a shade of dark forest green, but they’re not serrated or spiky. It is often grown for its highly ornamental fruit. It produces striking shiny black berries.
Emerald Green Arborvitae is an excellent evergreen option for many applications. It’s stately and slender, growing up to 12’ tall. This symmetrical conical tree looks great in a row as a hedge, as a structural accent on either side of a drive or walkway, or as a tall centerpiece for a grouping of different shrubs. It is a bright and glossy medium green.
Globe Arborvitae has a naturally rounded shape, hence the name. It can get fairly large, up to 8’ tall and wide, so it’s not ideal for containers. It can make a unique hedge or act as a beautiful single specimen feature. Its foliage is quite lacy and is a classic rich green color.
Juniper is one of the most diverse families of evergreen. From ground cover to huge trees, ice-blue-green to deep-green to chartreuse, and elegant lacy scale foliage to coarse sharp needles, there are nearly 70 different varieties of juniper! They’re tough, beautiful, and some varieties produce the berries used to make gin. There’s almost certainly one that will suit your landscaping style and color scheme.
Hinoki Falsecypress is a beautiful, finely textured evergreen tree. It does get quite large, up to 50’ tall and up to 20’ wide at maturity. It grows quite densely, which can make it an excellent choice for a large-scale privacy hedge or windbreak, though it does grow quite slowly.
Take your yard’s elegance and beauty up a notch this fall by adding some beautiful and low-maintenance evergreen trees and shrubs. Just remember to water them well for the first year and give them a cozy mulch blanket to protect their roots through the winter. Stop by Dammanns today to see what we have in stock, or talk to one of our experts about which evergreens would best suit your yard.