Trees & shrubs Ideas, Tips & Guides

COME AND JUST TAKE A WALK with me. No big plant lesson, nothing to prune or weed or sow.

So is Codonopsis (seen about to ascend a barberry in my front yard, below), or even some annuals of your choosing. Avoid heavy, woody vines like wisteria or trumpet vine, or those with so much foliage (like a large morning glory) that they’ll smother the underlying host plant.Simply plant the vine in the general proximity of said shrub, and give the vine an indication of what’s expected of it (a bit of bamboo heading in the right general direction…look closely and you’ll see it in the picture above).The clematis in the bottom photo had a cane to help it up into the gold

I invited my favorite fruit expert, Lee Reich, author of many exceptional garden books, including “Grow Fruit Naturally” and “Weedless Gardening” and “The Pruning Book,” to come talk figs on my public-radio show and podcast. (I’m giving away a copy of “Grow Fruit Naturally;” enter by commenting in the box at the very bottom of the page.)I often refer to Lee as “the unusual fruit guy,” because one of his first books I read was “Uncommon Fruits Worthy of Attention.” Lee lives with blueberries and paw paws and medlars and kiwis and of course figs and more not far from me, across the Hudson in New Paltz, New York, on what he calls his farm-den (as in half-farm, half-garden) loaded with unusual fruits.Learn wh

Long before I grew ‘Diablo’ (the name on its tag, but which I later learned is ‘Diabolo’) I brought a rooted cutting of the golden-leaf form of Physocarpus (above), called ‘Dart’s Gold,’ home from Western Hills Nursery in Northern California. Or at least I thought it was ‘Dart’s Gold.’But like ‘Diablo,’ my so-called ‘Dart’s Gold’ got really big in time, like 10 by 10 feet or even wider; the labels say otherwise, that it gets to just 5 feet or so. I suspect my gold one is just ‘Luteus,’ or maybe ‘Luteus’ and ‘Dart’s Gold’ are the same thing, who knows?

ONE OF MY TOP BIRD-GARDEN PICKS (and not bad from a gardener’s-eye view, either) has been stealing the show the last few days. It’s crabapple season here, so I wanted to be sure to invite you to stroll through my slideshow on them, which includes lots of tips and links loaded with crabapple information as well.

This first-ever columnar conifer in my garden career came about quite by accident. I was actually looking for what a friend refers to as “a blob” (a sort of lumpy, wider-than-tall, hummocky-shaped shrub) to replace a Daphne ‘Carol Mackie’ that was badly snow-damaged last fall.Shop as I might for the right new “blob,” I saw nothing that was just right. And then I bumped into another friend at the garden center, who said, “Why not something vertical instead? Change it up.” Aha!punctuation points i considered:<a href=«http://www.missouribotanicalgarden.org/gardens-gardening/your-garden/plant-finder/plant-details/kc/f930/thuja-occidentalis-degroot» s-spire.aspx>Thuja occidentalis ‘Degroot’s Spire:’ Ilex crenata ‘Sky Pencil’ (Japanese holly):  Grows to 10 feet and 2-3 feet wide; will need help, such as from a cat’s cradle of fishing lin

I have a number of Kousa dogwoods, or Cornus kousa, a species native to Japan, China and Korea that’s been in cultivation since Victorian times. I’m sure you know it; besides later, larger flowers than our native C. florida, it has larger fruit and good fall color (so does the American). The Kousa’s bark gets handsome as it matures, peeling in the nicest camouflage pattern, and the tree seems virtually disease-resistant, especially compared to the American with its susceptiblity to anthracnose fungus. But I digress from the beauty-contest at hand.Here’s the thing: I’ve never liked the plant, named C.k. ‘Lustgarten Weeping,’ which I’ve grown from a tiny grafted creature of mere twig-like proportion I bought from Dan Hinkley maybe a decade ago, to its current 9-foot spread and 5-foot height. Every year I mean to toss it out. Really.

THE GARDEN HAS AWAKENED, and I thought you might want to meet the early risers. Somebody new’s showing up every day now (almost every hour). Enjoy.

IT HAS BEEN MONTHS SINCE I uploaded a photo gallery, and right now it’s definitely carpe diem…or carpe not at all, with the last bits fading fast. Here, then, are some of the final stars, the stalwarts of recent weeks, who despite harsh times gave (and give) mightily.

AS IF IT KNOWS THAT FIREWORKS ARE CALLED FOR this weekend, the biggest old bottlebrush buckeye here, Aesculus parviflora (above), is in full bloom. Pow! A 15-foot-wide by 12-foot-tall mass of high energy, with each bloom more than a foot tall.

I have two other Abies concolor here (I know, there’s evidence of my former“everything in threes” insanity again), the other two grown naturally, unshorn, and therefore quite different-looking. I won’t tell you what I paid for the big guy, all thick and a perfect pyramid and already near 10 feet tall when he came to me to live on my hillside of a backyard, among the crabapples and a giant island of ornamental grasses. The others were scrawny little things, maybe 3 feet high, though each is more than 15 tall now.The white, or concolor fir, a Western American native species ranging from Colorado to Southern California, New Mexico and into Mexico, can grow to 100 feet in the wild, apparently, but in a garden setting you are more likely to see it get to 30 or maybe 50 feet in time, and half as wide.Its long needles, which are particularly silvery-blue in the cultivar ‘Candicans,’ curve outward

As with any animal or insect pests, the work starts with reducing habitat—especially places they can overwinter. Close-cutting the entire lawn here is one of the final things I do in late fall, lowering the deck to 3 inches to reduce places to hide in general.For mice and voles, it’s essential to install fine-gauge hardware-cloth collars (or heavy plastic ones) around young trees, in particular, though these and other rodents will chew wood young or old if hungry. It’s especially to make sure that the immediate area at the base of trees is clear. Friends with orchards do not allow turf to

It’s fast growing.Its foliage is willow-like, and in the ‘Argentea’ (meaning silver-leaved) cultivar I grow, a pleasing grayish-green, if not wildly silver.Its flowers are fragrant, like those of its cousins. Deadheading after bloom will somewhat reduce the messy twiginess, especially of older plants.And like I said, the butterflies really like it.Sources for Buddleia alternifolia: At High Country Gardens At Forest Farm Categoriesdeciduous trees & shrubsTagsbutterfly plants

The bottlebrush buckeye, one of four around the yard, had grown to a hummock-shaped thing of about 10 feet high and 15 or so feet across, a community unto itself with many suckers beneath the oldest stems. This suckering habit will prove to be its (and my) salvation, as younger shoots are known to grow several feet a year, which gives me hope that in time I’ll have my hummock back.I waded into the fallen mess carefully just yesterday, once I’d had time to really look at it for a few days from all angles and think about the right approach to its rejuvenation. (Up top is how the damaged shrub looked from the house; just above, from farther out in the landscape, looking toward

Her names derives from the German for “lady of well-rounded form,” but I grow her a little on the lean and wiry side, which if you’ve ever seen me will come as no surprise.  I grow several plants weaving up and out through the perimeter of an old winterhazel, or Corylopsis spicata, whose foliage (like that of ‘Matrona’) has a pinkish-purple cast in places (in the winterhazel, it’s on new growth). You can see a Corylopsis leaf with this characteristic in the upper right of the photo above.These two same-but-different plants have become good friends, and the Corylopsis shades the Sedum just enough to make it stretch to 30 inches or thereabouts (24 would be more the norm in full sun). It also

IPLANNED ANOTHER SLIDESHOW of what’s blooming here, the third weekly installment since spring 2011 started taking hold. And then…my camera angrily decided against it this morning, as I headed out to document the latest arrivals.

If you have a spot for a big shrub (my oldest of four or five here is more than 15 feet across and maybe 12 feet high) perhaps you want to adopt one? In the North, bottlebrush buckeye will do in either sun or shade, but they really sucker up nicely in semi-shade or shade, making a July splash with creamy wand-like flowers. The handsome foliage goes gold in fall.The full story on how I almost lost my beloved first-born bottlebrush buckeye is here (and probably in the photo links below, too). Miraculously, in just two years it has already regained half of its lost bits, and growing strong–even if it doesn’t yield any pears. Categoriestrees & shrubs

Taxus baccata ‘Repandens Aurea’ came to me like so many plants as a rooted cutting many years ago, a misshapen little nothing two gardening friends convinced me to order by mail. (You can sometimes get one at Forest Farm, though not every year.) It is about half way now to a mature size of perhaps 12 feet across and 2 to 4 feet high, and though it’s still irregularly shaped the yew has taken on considerable presence when I recall the wretched thing it was the day that I unpacked it from its traveling suit of wet newsprint.I actually have three of the spreading golden yews here. (Why is it that I order everything in threes? Is it my lopsided version of Noah’s Ark?). The one shown (top) is swimming in a lake of big-root geranium, G. macrorrhizum. It’s a bed where I recently decided to up the golden quotient by adding a cutleaf golden staghorn sumac, Rhus typhina ‘Tiger Eyes’ (background), another plant whose leaves I lo

You may remember some of these from A Way to Garden’s series on beloved conifers: You can find those plant profiles by going to this easily browsable page. Many links to individual plant portraits are listed below. But first, the tour (click on the first thumbnail to start the slideshow, then navigate from image to image by clicking the arrows beside the caption): Favorite Coniferous Trees(click any green type to link to the profile of that plant)Golden hinoki cypress, Chamaecyparis obtusa ‘Crippsii’Japanese umbrella pine, Sciadopitys verticillataConcolor fir, Abies concolorWeeping Alaska cedar

BETWEEN WEEDING, WATERING, EDGING, MULCHING, I noticed there are some new things blooming…like several dozen.

I knew nothing at all when I heaved the then-very-rare, chest-high young Sciadopitys verticillata out of the ground in the borough of Queens in New York City, and plopped it unceremoniously into a bushel basket for the trip several hours north. I picked a spot for it when there was nothing but one giant rhododendron alone in the middle of the yard behind the house, connected to nothing. I made the umbrella pine its companion, and hoped they would get along.There was no back porch then (and therefore no stepping stones leading to it); there was no nothing but unmown grass and wild raspberries tangled throughout it, and my youthful enthusiasm. The house was a wreck; the back foundation, in fact–perhaps 15 or 20 feet from where this most beautiful of conifers now stands about 20 feet tall–had collapsed, and a swath of plastic sheeting was all that formed the barrier between outside and in below ground level.Today, as spring gives way to summer begrudgingly, leaving spoiled flowers to clean up and not much at “pe

IAM PLAYING MAKE-BELIEVE AGAIN, pretending it didn’t ice over and then snow again last night for good measure. I’m dreaming of color (not a persistent white-on-white tundra), like the other-worldly blue foliage of my favorite rose, Rosa glauca (above).

WHAT CAN I SAY? I’m shacked up over here with a whole lot of plants, I admit it. Click the photos to get to the third (largest) view for best effects. Enjoy.

DIRCA PALUSTRIS, OR LEATHERWOOD (top photo), is one of my garden’s real oddities. This woodland native is shaped like a small rounded tree and grows to about 6 feet tall. It blooms in late April here, with tiny yellow brush-like flowers–a charming companion to the shade garden’s minor bulbs and little ephemerals. I got my first plant at the New England Wild Flower Society, and it has made more. Read NEWFS’s portrait of leatherwood.LILACS ARE FLEETING, YES, but I cannot imagine a garden without their moment. so they are one of the single-season plants I make room for here. Lots of room. My favorite lilacs.SPIRAEA THUNBERGII ‘OGON’ gives me eight and a half months of gleam in my cold Zone 5B garden, starting with flowers in early spring followed by gold foliage that never says die till December. Spiraea ‘Ogon’ profiled.YUCCA FILAMENTOSA ‘COLOR GUARD’ soldi

I HAVE ALREADY SPOUTED OFF ABOUT HOW I AM NO FLOWER GIRL. Foliage rules here. Month 3, and it still looks good. What flower can say that? Oh, really?

Each May and June I’m asked, “Why didn’t my lilacs bloom?” only to find out in the next sentence that the questioners had literally nipped the plants in the (flower) bud with late summer, fall, winter or earliest springtime pruning, long after the new year’s blossoms had been set.Early bloomers flower on old wood. Go out and look at a forsythia or a lilac: Unless you pruned in summer or fall, you’ll see flower buds already in place, dormant but there. If you prune now, it won’t flower now. Make sense?Generally speaking, don’t prune spring-blooming shrubs and trees more than a month or so after they finish blooming. After flowering, prune immediately. You will typically not harm the pla

HELLO, SUNSHINE–AND NOT JUST IN THE SKY. Cornus mas is an increasingly vibrant cloud of gold up on my hillside the last week.

REMEMBER, NOTHING LASTS. I have mentioned this before, and probably will not shut up about it anytime soon (unless forces bigger than me silence me for good).

Click on the first thumbnail to start the slideshow, then toggle from slide to slide using the arrows beside the caption—or the arrow keys on your computer. Enjoy.And in case you want a little extra-credit reading:Lee Reich on blueberry growing. A good list of blueberry varieties A little Fothergilla history The story of Sassafras albidum Categoriesslideshows trees & shrubs

The Latin specific epithet, or species name, of the Stewartia I grow is pseudocamellia, which roughly means it disguises itself as a camellia when in bloom (a nod to the look of its lovely and plentiful white June-into-July flowers, and the fact they are very distant relatives in the Tea Family).But this Stewartia, from Japan, which gets to maybe 25 feet or so in a Northeast garden setting and is happy in part shade or sun, isn’t content to offer up just nice flowers for the privilege of living with you. It gives you peeling, lovely bark all season long (below), and hot fall color, too,

CEDAR APPLE RUST is having a banner year here. So what do you do when you live with warring roommates? In the case of the back-and-forth rounds of battle between the towering Eastern red cedar (Juniperus virginiana) in my front yard and all apples and apple relatives around the place, nothing.Well, I do watch in fascination, especially at the stage of cedar apple rust above (a few weeks ago), when orange, almost gelatinous “telial horns” are developing where the cedar galls were last fall and winter. I don’t intervene, despite the havoc this fungus causes, particularly foliar damage and defoliation of apple relatives (the reason my shadbush, or Amelanchier, and my oldest of apples lose their leaves so early each year; the reason I don’t even try to grow hawthorns).Quince, crabapple and pear are some of the other plants similarly affected.

ONE OF US IS GETTING OLD, EITHER ME OR THE STEWARTIA. That realization struck this morning when I glimpsed its flowers from my bedroom window, something that wasn’t possible from that distant vantage point in all the years before.

For year-round gold in the garden, except when a covering of snow tries to hide it, lacy ‘Crippsii’ would be (and is) my choice. It has a graceful habit, particularly if grown in slightly more shade than sun, as my oldest plant among several here has been for a decade or so.If you read up on the Hinokis, many references will say to grow them in full sun, but here’s my issue: Out in the full sun, I can’t give this beauty the winter-wind protection it needs here in Zone 5 to prevent browning of some foliage.Winterburn is often not fatal, but if

I have read that in the Pacific Northwest, ‘Ogon’ (Zones 4-8, sun to part shade) may even keep its leaves, and color—the kind of golden that’s closer to orange than yellow–until Christmas. This form of Spiraea starts its season with an early show of tiny white flowers on its otherwise-bare, arching branches, which pop before the willowy-textured yellow foliage appears.By summer ‘Ogon’ is yellow-green here, so even in its dullest moment not so bad. This is a great plant for the end of an axial view; mine is due west of where I sit and ponder (my current job: fulltime rumination). At 5 by 5 feet, ‘Ogon’ makes quite an impact even in such a long view. The one here is beside a winterberry holly of equal size, and the two have intermingled, together

Geranium macrorrhizum, the big-root geranium: I wonder how many square miles of this plant I have grown. The bigroot geranium is so named because instead of a clumping habit, it grows from a ropelike rhizome that seems to barely need to touch the ground to thrive. Its attractive foliage has an aromatic, spicy scent, and is nearly evergreen even in my Zone 5B garden.It will survive, I think, except in the wet; sun or shade, and even dry shade. All I give it is an annual haircut, and I do that when spring is turning to summer, the flowers have gone by and the leaves are stretching upward. Deadheading would be another option, but just shearing the whole plant is faster in masses, and also keeps it tighter and denser.The straight species is pink (but not pastel); if Pepto Bismol isn’t going to

Neither one asks much of the gardener for nonstop April or May through December appeal, and the Hakonechloa even likes a semi-shaded spot.Profiles:Categories ..