Why I Oughta...

Planted in the Fall of 2021, our Mugo Pine is (now...almost two years later) still a small, evergreen shrub.    I last looked at it a little over a year ago (August 2022), when it was looking good - green and compact and full of needles .   Early this past Winter (November 2022), the dang rabbits went at this thing and gnawed off a bunch of the tips .  And...the little jerks just left them there.   Of course, that meant that a chicken wire ring needed to be put up to protect it from the pests.  Like the Toad Lilies, I've left this chicken wire ring up all Summer.   Here, below, is what the Mugo Pine looks like below.  First, a look from the top-down.  Then, from the side-on: It has put on some height this year and has opened-up a bit.  What was dense and compact last year is now a little more airy.  The tips are full of longer needles that are reaching up-and-out.  I don't have a ton of conifers, so looking at th...

The trio of Gold Cone Junipers (that...frankly weren't the right shrubs at the right time in the right place), have been there, filling up space in the beds for four-going-on-five growing seasons .  They get a Spring flush that earns their name - with gold needles .  But, when I was out wandering around the beds, I noticed that these were putting on a different, pre-flush show:  grey-ish tips.  See below for a photo of the top of the evergreen shrub: Nice little moment - and look for these that I haven't documented in the garden diary before, but now I'll look for it come early Spring in upcoming seasons.  

For the past few years (planted in 2019), we've had a creeping/crawling Juniper shrub planted in a patio container out back.  I put it in this container and attempted to prune it a little bit and wire it up when I was focused on trying my hand at bonsai .   Two years later (Spring of 2021), I was seeing some wire damage and (for now) abandoned the project .  My thought was....let this thing grow a bit more, then let's revisit it for pruning and shaping as it is more mature.   On a recent walk in the backyard, I came across (or...really...'noticed') this shrub in the container and I was (temporarily) alarmed.  Look at it in the photo below.  It is maroon-ish/green.  Or, I suppose, one could view it as greenish/maroon-ish/brown-ish/grey-ish?  Is that a color? (That is a lot of 'ishes'.) I snapped that photo and then went looking back in the garden diary here.  I found this post from two years ago - December of 2020 .  Good news:...

Last last Fall (October), I bought and planted a small 1# Mugo Pine in our backyard garden - in the north side beds between the Harry Lauder Walking Stick tree and our Weeping Nootka Cypress tree.  I posted the details of the Mugo Pine and how it was doing over Winter here in early January .    Fast forward seven months and what does it look like during its first true growing season?  See below for the new growth and size that it has put on this Summer: I haven't paid particular attention to it, but since it is located in this bed, it has been sprinkler watered along with everything else.  There are some brown needles along the interior, but I'm seeing a lot of bottle-brush-like growth on all the tips.  Good growing - so far.   And...the rabbits don't have any interest in it.  Again...so far.

Last season, I bought a 1# Bird's Nest Spruce for $5 (50% off) and decided to stick it in the ground in the nursery container that it came in from the Big Box nursery .  My thinking - at the time - was that I wanted to treat that as a sort-of 'pre-bonsai' specimen.  Buy small (for $5), grow on my own property and then in a few years, I'd have something INTERESTING (and more mature) to try to prune. This past Winter, the tips were all enjoyed by those dang rabbits who reduced it to this tiny conifer shrub you see in the center of the photo below: I've come to the conclusion that I'm better served by getting this small evergreen shrub planted in the ground - so it can root - and grow into an interesting contrast shrub.  I'm not terribly unhappy with the current placement, so maybe this is just a simple:  pop the can up, shake out, and stick back in the ground project.  Something I'll do early this Spring.

During the past week or so, I've been poking around doing research into evergreens for this year and think about shrubs and trees that might work in certain spots of our garden.  While I was doing that, I thought that I should do some level of an informal audit on what is in place.  Of course, there are the Hicks yews (in multiple places), but also a couple of Junipers and just last year, I added a Bird's Nest Spruce that I left in the nursery container .   But, when I went out in the yard to have a look at what else there was, I realized that I planted another conifer that I failed to document in the [ garden diary ] this past fall:  a Mugo Pine.  When I was planting some of those tiny Boxwoods , I also dug in a very small Mugo Pine.  While I failed to post about the small Pine going in, I *did* mention it during my 2021 scorecard post .  While that's just fine, I do think this small conifer shrub deserves a post of its own.   What is a...