A GREAT WAY to enhance your yard and entrance-way is to incorporate evergreen displays around your house and/or business. And since November is the perfect time to prune your evergreens, let us discuss winter botanical displays.
When blue spruce, yellow-tip fitzer juniper, western red cedar, Douglas fir, red cryptomeria, weeping Alaskan cedar, pachysandra berry and arborvitae are all designed together, a nice floral arrangement is made.
If incorporating evergreens along with berries or red dogwood twigs is essential to our integrated holidays display, then knowing how to gather them is crucial.
Most of the conifers have terminal tips or central leaders, so if you cut off the tips, you change the growth characteristics and silhouette of that plant. There are only two types of pruning cuts that exist: thinning or heading.
Heading or heading off a branch or tree, bush or shrub is accomplished by cutting across that branch or stem. Somewhere along the branch and always just above a node, make your cut. Heading produces new growth at the nodes.
This is how Christmas trees are formed and grown. Growers head off all the branches, which stops the tips from growing but produces an abundance of side shoots. This is why commercial trees are so thick compared with wild trees that Charlie Brown would pick.
Heading is the superior method to thicken up your plants, or make them lush and dense.
Thinning cuts are the vast majority of my pruning actions. In a thinning cut, we follow the branch or stem down to the point where it radiates off another branch, stem, main trunk or pruning cane, and then cut it off at that point. Thinning cuts rarely produce new growth, but the remaining growth develops much stronger, faster and better.
November is the ideal time to prune your evergreens and for the next several months, the naturally occurring temperatures, along with the humidity, will mimic florists’ coolers. That means that your arrangements, baskets, pots, door swags, garland or wreaths last for several months in good condition.
I always begin my creations by laying down my most abundant type of evergreen, which is usually fir. I place in layer upon layer, or stick in numerous branches filling the pot or basket. This base acts as a pin cushion for the rest of the arrangement, allowing me to stick in any of the cool-colored branches I have.
Gradually, I add holly here, juniper there, a sprig of spruce or a nice chunk of cypress until the arrangement is complete.
Then you add whatever sizzle you like, such as corkscrew willow branches, velvet bows or a nice set of gold and silver bells.
This is all about you, your creativity, inspiration and self expression.
As we all begin to celebrate the dark, drizzly days with our bright creative creations, we will transform our area to a place of beauty, inspiration and become the cutting edge of a new horticultural frontier.
Please help me and others in this task.
Become your own botanical wonder and of course … please, stay well all.
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Andrew May is a freelance writer and ornamental horticulturist who dreams of having Clallam and Jefferson counties nationally recognized as “Flower Peninsula USA.” Send him questions c/o Peninsula Daily News, P.O. Box 1330, Port Angeles, WA 98362, or email news@peninsuladailynews.com (subject line: Andrew May).
