Tag Archives: conifers

Gardening for winter

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Here are a couple of images of the gardens at JLBG to show how we garden for the winter months. By selecting and designing your garden for the winter season, it will automatically look great during the other three seasons. Plants featured include hellebores, rohdea, ophiopogon (mondo grass), sabal palm, Illicium 'Florida Sunshine', and a number of conifers. Here's one of our woodland streams featuring Aucuba 'Limbata', carex, and rohdea. With proper plant selection, the garden in winter doesn't have to be a lifeless canvas of mulch. Read more [...]

Friday Morning Podcast

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Here are some decorative seed pods from the garden this week. AgapanthusPennisetum Taxodium CannaCattail Read more [...]

Lies, Damn Lies, and Plant Labels

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We just snapped this photo of Lemon Thread Cypress (Chamaecyparis pisifera 'Lemon Thread') in the gardens here at Juniper Level, and wanted to share since it illustrates our constant rants about trusting nurseries, plant tags, and websites to give accurate mature sizes. For a woody plant, our typical advice is to triple any size you are given. So, we wanted to see how that advice would work with the plant below.

Lemon Thread cypress was discovered in the mid 1980s as a sport at Oregon's Mitsch Nurseries, so it's a relative newcomer as plants go. Our 20 year old specimen is planted in compost-amended sandy loam without any chemical fertilizers ever. We should also add that we don't believe in shearing plants, which we find a waste of energy as well as a middle finger to natures's beauty. Our specimen now measures 25' tall x 15' wide.

We then searched the web for Lemon Thread Cypress and recorded the sizes from the top 30 sites that came up in Google...see notes below the photo.  Sizes Read more [...]