Evergreen trees and shrubs provide
continuity in our home landscapes, a reassuring presence through
the changing seasons. They are useful plants, sheltering us from
wind, rain, and snow as well as creating privacy, obscuring nearby
eyesores, and providing food and protection to birds and other wildlife.
And they are beautiful, offering a delightful variety of foliage,
flower, and form. Long-lived and often sizable, these
plants are important elements in any home landscape and should be
chosen carefully. In this Guide, we'll introduce evergreen trees
and shrubs, suggest ways you can use them, and outline how to get
started growing them.
WHAT IS AN EVERGREEN TREE OR SHRUB?-
Plants that retain their leaves year-round are called evergreens.
Of course, these plants drop and replace leaves, but they usually
do it a few at a time. When many people think of evergreen trees
and shrubs, they're likely to think of pines, spruces, and junipers,
plants whose leaves are long and thin like needles or tiny and layered
like scales on a fish. These plants produce seeds in woody "cones"
and are called conifers.
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Another group of evergreens have leaves
in as wide a variety of sizes and shapes as do their deciduous cousins.
These "broad-leaved" evergreens include rhododendrons, hollies,
live oaks, acacias, eucalyptus, euonymus, and citrus.
There is no hard and fast dividing
line between trees and shrubs. In general, trees have a single stem,
or trunk, whereas shrubs have multiple stems. But yaupon holly,
a small evergreen tree, can have numerous stems, while a low-growing
"shrubby" juniper may have only one. Size isn't much help either;
a rhododendron can outstrip many small trees in height. Some plants
can be either trees or shrubs, depending on how they're trained
and pruned. Fortunately, most of us "know" a shrub or a tree when
we see one, based on a commonsense judgment involving height, growth
habit, and landscape use.
USES IN THE LANDSCAPE-
Evergreens are versatile plants. In addition to the uses mentioned
above, they can muffle noise, provide shade, define the boundaries
of our property, and delineate spaces for recreation, entertaining,
and other activities within those boundaries.
They exhibit a variety of shapes and
sizes suitable for many purposes. Ground-hugging junipers are ideal
for ground covers; a majestic spruce can anchor a large-scale composition.
Coniferous trees tend to be conical when young, but with age a number
of them, such as Japanese black pine and Tanyosho pine, become strikingly
picturesque, their branches gnarled, their profile irregular. Some
conifers have weeping forms. Some are amazingly maleable-yew, for
example, can become a 40-ft. tree or a dense, closely cropped hedge.
Broad-leaved evergreen trees are almost as varied in form as are
their deciduous counterparts. Broad-leaved and coniferous ever green
shrubs take a wide variety of forms naturally and can be trained
to almost any shape.
Creating shade-
We don't usually think of conifers as shade trees-many lack a spreading
crown and adequate headroom beneath for lounging, and their dense
foliage often casts a deep shade that is inhospitable to many understory
plants. However, making use of the shade cast beside these plants,
rather than beneath them, you can effectively cool a patio or lessen
heat buildup in parts of the house with eastern or southern exposures.
