Creating a Year Round Garden: The evergreen hedge
As a part our our newsletter, I wanted to create a series highlighting different plants that I love, plants that help me to create a year round garden . Every month I will post about a plant related to the season we are in and a bit about why I like it, I hope you find this series helpful in selecting plants for your garden garden.
5-3-2020. Planting the Yew Hedge
5-21-2020 Front Garden
9-28-2020 Front Garden Yew Hedge
10-27-2020 The last of the fall blooms in the front garden.
10-31-2020 Winter begins in the front garden.
Janurary 2021 - Front Garden after a fresh snow fall
The Yew and Boxwood Hedge
“…[Evergreens] they are the bones from which the flesh hangs…”
-Monty Don
The winter garden depends on good evergreens, for their structure, their obvious greeness, and the host of life they bring to the garden even in our coldest months. They are without a doubt crucial in the winter, but they are just as important in the summer, but they move to the back then, letting other players take center stage. I have come to realize their sculptural structure shouldn’t be under valued in any season.
There was once a time, at the very beginning of my career as a landscape designer, that I would have never planted or touted the glorious nature and value of a yew or boxwood hedge. Ridiculous as it sounds, I would have thought it a waste when so many other plants could have been chosen. Now, I have seen a lot of bad hedges, badly chosen, badly placed and badly pruned, in my ignorance I concluded that meant that these hedges were always bad choices, I didn’t separate the element, the plant itself from the poor usages. Something to chew on a bit in all areas of life…
Boy, was I an idiot, and frankly, entirely wrong.
We have a long winter here, from sometime in November until late March, and there just isn’t a lot happening. The trees stand stark and bare, the ground crusted with frost. Many of our beloved perennials have died back and are sleeping under ground, some remain, a few are tough enough to keep their form and foliage through the cold, some leave us with fading seed heads and stalks for the winter. But the real structural hero of the winter garden are evergreen shrubs and trees, and one I particularly love is a good yew or boxwood hedge.
The evergreen hedge is a beautiful green backdrop all growing season, it provides a living fence, a boundary to the garden, and in winter - it is an essential structure and still a deep rich green despite all that the season can through at it. The evergreen hedge also creates a protected space, a garden surrounded in part or completely by a hedge from 3-12’ high is creating a micro climate, the wind can’t whip through the space in the same way, it shelters the plants and the creatures.
It can be a haven for wildlife. The birds come and perch on ours, they also enjoy the bird table in the garden that is low and sheltered from the wind by the hedge, with the hedge offering protection and a place to hide in, we have never seen so many birds in our front garden, they hangout there all day.
I have come (or are continuing to everyday) appreciate the value of each and every plant, its life, form, structure, foliage, texture, movement, color, bloom, fruit, etc. When I stand in my garden, the fact that I get to harvest from it is lovely and part of why I grow things, but the beauty in a garden, of tending one, of being in it, the ecosystems that springs up around it, you get all these benefit from your garden long before you pick that apple, and you know at that point, the apples (or what have) don’t even seem the reason you did it all, but instead a beautiful bonus.