Add Timeless Shrubs to Your Garden
(Page 3 of 5)
December/January 2000
By Geraldine Adamich Laufer
Using Evergreens as Screens
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The traditional use of holly, aside from yuletide decorations, is for screening. Small-leaved hollies including inkberry, winterberry, yaupon, and Japanese holly do very well when clipped and are ideal as low hedges. Larger holly cultivars with large leaves, such as Ilex ‘Nellie R. Stevens’ or ‘Emily Brunner’, must be hand-pruned and not sheared, lest the leaves look ragged.
While the common privet, used medicinally as an astringent, is not very attractive, its shiny-leaved evergreen relatives, California privets (Ligustrum ovalifolium) and Texas privets (L. japonicum ‘Texanum’) may be selected for a bold, vase-shaped shrub with aromatic, creamy white panicles of flowers followed by shiny black berries.
Possibly my favorite herbal shrub for screening is bayberry (Myrica pensylvanica) or its southern sister M. cerifera, known as Southern wax myrtle, which obligingly grows in sun or shade, wet or dry soils, and on fertile or infertile sites. The leathery leaves, twigs, and all parts of the shrub are highly aromatic, and waxy gray bayberries blanketing the branches of female plants can be stripped off and added to melted candle wax to yield a wonderful bayberry fragrance.
Needle-Leaved Evergreens
These species are an important group of herbal shrubs. Junipers, for example, rank as the toughest of evergreen landscape plants, come in a wide variety of sizes, shapes, and colors, and are widely used in every climate zone. Common juniper (Juniperus communis) was used medicinally as a diuretic and stimulant. The fleshy cones, or berries, give the characteristic aromatic flavor to gin. Numerous dwarf cultivars are available and useful in the herb garden. ‘Hibernica’ and ‘Fastigiata’, the blue-green Irish junipers, have a rigid columnar shape. The Eastern red cedar (J. virginiana) is used as a dye plant.
Pines are important herbal trees, providing timber, wood pulp, turpentine, tar, rosin, pine oil, and edible pine nuts—but few of them fall into the category of shrubs. Pinus mugo varieties are usually prostrate ground cover pines, although there is great variation in habit.
A third evergreen, the English yew (Taxus baccata) is symbolic of mourning and is traditionally planted in cemeteries. Yew is outstanding for formal clipped hedges and topiary. Southern yew (Cephalotaxus harringtonia) has the same black-green foliage.
Deciduous Herbal Shrubs
The queen of all deciduous flowering shrubs is the rose, and fragrant heirloom roses are especially suitable for the herb garden. In the words of Sackville-West, “The old roses are a wide subject to embark on. You have to consider the Gallicas, the Damasks, the Centifolias or Cabbage, the Musks, the China, the Rose of Provins. . . all more romantic the one than the other, whose very names suggest a honeyed southern dusk. Although most of them suffer from the drawback of flowering only once during a season, what incomparable lavishness they give, while they are about it. They have a generosity which is as desirable in plants as in people.”
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