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.


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.
Here are some decorative seed pods from the garden this week.
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 we found range from 2-5′ tall x 2-3′ wide with only one site giving a height greater than 10′.
Is it any wonder that people install plants in the wrong place! So, why does this happen? Many reasons:
2-5′ | 2-3′ |
3′ | 4′ |
3-5′ | 2-4′ |
4′ | 3′ |
5′ | 4′ |
5′ | 5′ |
5′ | 4′ |
5-12′ | 7-8′ |
5-6′ | 6-8′ |
6-8′ | 3-4′ |
12′ |