Your Garden
CONIFERS are fabulous plants in the garden giving a great array of colours, textures, heights, shapes and smells.
They range from groundcovers to towering trees with everything in between. My pet hate is the way labels describe the size.
I find giving a height at 10 years very misleading as it gives no hint at the final size causing potential problems in years to come.
However, many are suitable for trimming and therefore, size and shape can be maintained as long as the pruning is done a little at a time rather than a drastic haircut from which most will not recover. Conifer hedges are a great way to wall an area or make an impenetrable wind break where height is an issue. Again don’t wait until the hedge reaches the required height before trimming.
There are some lovely and quite old cypress hedges around Armidale. In the UK yew hedges and topiaries are everywhere, some being incredibly old and with care yew will grow here but seems to be out of fashion due to its slow growth.
However, in the long term slow growth makes for much easier maintenance.
Many of the dwarf conifers can be trimmed and topiaried keeping them to size and shape, this includes the ground covers. Junipers trim well too making them very useful garden plants many of which have soft blue hues.
The cryptomerias and some thujas have lovely foliage colour in autumn and winter some turning orange, purple or some brown. The rich golds are also great in the right place giving beautiful colour especially in winter when it is most needed. Conifers come in such an array of colours, blues, golds and many different greens making them so useful to create a coloured palette in your garden.
There are also quite a number of weeping or contorted conifers giving us those wonderful shapes and structure adding interest to the garden. Many of the weeping varieties need staking until they reach the desired height.
Another family are the araucarias, a small genus but with a couple suitable to our climate, monkey puzzles and bunyas. Both eventually end up very large but have wonderful form and a rich colour.
Finally there are the deciduous conifers including taxodium, larches, sequoias, metasequoias, gingkos and glyptostrobus. The taxodiums are very useful in wet areas as they will grow in water.
The new foliage on these deciduous species is an iridescent green and in autumn they colour up nicely giving the garden four seasons.
There are so many different conifers, I have only touched on the choice available. Unfortunately many, being slow growing, are expensive to buy and many are extremely difficult to source.
