Using Evergreen Trees in Landscapes
Evergreen trees and shrubs keep their foliage throughout the year and serve many uses in a home landscape, especially in cold-winter climates.
Coniferous Evergreens
Use evergreens as a foundation for your yard’s beauty. They have many uses in a landscape, from serving as hedges, foundation plants, and windbreaks to providing year-round structure, form, and definition as well as beautifying gardens, lawns and beds.
The two primary divisions of evergreens are needle-leaved and broad-leaved.
Needle-leaved evergreens are often referred to as conifers. Most but not all are, and are cone-bearing plants with needlelike or scale like leaves.
Conifers range in size from the coast redwood, Sequoia sempervirens, which grows to more than 360 feet (110 m) in height, to dwarf conifers that grow to only a few inches or centimeters tall.
Cedar, cypress, fir, juniper, pine, and spruce are all conifers. Bald cypress, larch, and dawn redwood are exceptions. These conifers are deciduous and shed their needles in winter.
Because of their wide gradations of color, size, and shape, one might design a four-season garden full of contrast by using coniferous evergreens alone. Needle colors range from frosty silver or muted green to soft steel blue and golden yellow.
Broad-Leaved Evergreens
Broad-leaved evergreens have leaves rather than needles. One of the most easily recognized broad-leaved evergreen trees are towering southern magnolias with large glossy leaves and intensely fragrant white blooms.
Rhododendron is another beloved broad-leaved evergreen and semi-evergreen shrub. Both rhododendron and azaleas, two members of the same family, bloom with a colorful range of flowers in spring or summer.
It is important to note that some plants may be evergreen in one set of climate conditions while they are deciduous in another.
For example, plants such as privet and dwarf pomegranate hold their leaves year-round in mild-winter climates, but shed their leaves in cold-winter areas.
Finally, some tree and shrub families have both evergreen and deciduous species.
For example, one thinks of holly as an evergreen, since most holly species hold their leaves year-round.
Ilex verticillata ‘Sparkleberry’ or ‘Winter Red,’ however, are deciduous and especially prized for their multitude of brightly colored berries during winter on bare branches.