Tag: colorado blue spruce

Rear Garden Refresh

Along the back fence line we had three big spruces that afforded us privacy from the rear neighbors. But age, disease, weather and water were not their friend. After one fell down and the second came perilously close to falling down, we ended taking them out April. My previous posts, “Another Tree Toppled” and “Spruce Down“, tell the whole sad story.

They had been on the decline for a while, but it was still a big loss to have them come down.

But it gave me a chance to rethink what we’d like to have there. Because of the wetness of the swale area and widespread spruce Cytospora canker, it was not an option to replant more spruce. Arborvitae make a great privacy hedge, would also not do well in that location so I had to go in a different direction.

One of my complaints about many of the shrubs we have is that they have to be pruned yearly to be appropriate for the space.

Here was a chance to create a hedge of shrubs that could be allowed to grow naturally. It’d eventually be dense enough to provide privacy in the summer and a distraction in the winter.

What to plant? I knew I needed Zone 5 hardiness and the growing conditions weren’t ideal for many shrubs, so I settled on viburnums as the main plantings. There’s a large selection of varieties, each with different flowering patterns, fall colors and sizes. I then included a couple of hydrangeas to add some floral interest in the front.

Interesting fact about planting Viburnum dentatums, like I planned, is that they are not self pollinating. They need to have a different cultivar planted nearby with a similar flowering time to have adequate pollination and berry production. I didn’t know this before researching this new bed, and it explains why my other viburnums never really seemed to set many berries.

We planted:

(2) Chicago Lustre® Arrowwood Viburnum (Viburnum dentatum ‘Synnestvedt’) These large viburnums will grow 10′ to 12′ in height with an 8′ to 10′ spread, has glossy foliage, produces creamy white flowers in mid- to late June and are highly attractive to birds for food and shelter. The fall berries are dark metallic blue and the leaves turn a mild purple-red. This viburnum is one of the Chicagoland Grows® varieties

(2) Blue Muffin™ Arrowwood Viburnum (Viburnum dentatum ‘Christom’) This viburnum is a more compact variety,  growing 5 to 7 feet high and 6 to 8 feet wide. It has medium green foliage, showy white flowers in mid-late June and turns orange to red in the fall. The abundant berries are a showy bright blue and a favorite of birds.

(3) Vanilla Strawberry Panicle Hydrangea (Hydrangeapaniculata ‘Renhy’ Vanilla Strawberry) This hydrangea grows 6 to 8 ft high and 4-5 ft wide and flowers as beautifully as the name sounds. The large flowery panicles (7” by 5”) develop in mid-summer, beginning white and finally maturing late summer to pinkish-red. The strawberry red flower color typically lasts for 3-4 weeks prior to flowers turning brown in the fall.

And what a beautiful show! Especially when the flowers match the sky.

In addition to the new plantings, there was an existing Bottlebrush Buckeye and Sargent Crab, which I decided were nice enough specimens to keep. The bottlebrush buckeye is a wide-spreading plant, growing 8 to 12 feet high and 12 to 15 feet wide. It blooms in early July, producing interesting long fluffy white flower clusters. This plant had already been moved once because it wasn’t in an appropriate space for it, so I hope it’s happier in this new location.

The Sargent Crab is a 6 to 10 foot dwarf crabapple. In spring, pink buds open to a profusion of fragrant, white flower clusters. This tree has also been moved a couple of times and settled into this location about 10 years ago. It’s been a very hardy specimen, and the berries seem to attract Cedar Waxwings to my backyard. That makes it a keeper!

I purposefully didn’t overdo the number of shrubs I planted.

In the past, I’ve been advised to plant too many plants that look great in a year or two, only to have to remove them a few years later because of overcrowding. Very wasteful. So this time I’ll be patient and have a healthy shrub border in a few years. In the meantime, I’ll enjoy the interesting colors and textures and fill in the spaces with some annuals.

I may have also added a few interesting daylilies even though I swore I was done buying any more. But how could I have passed up planting a VT Spirit Daylily (Hemerocallis VT Spirit), to celebrate one of my boys graduating this year??? Go Hokies 😉

Have you had a chance you redo an entire garden? How did it turn out?

Spruce Down :(

Like many across the Midwest and Northeast, we had an extremely windy week last week.

On Wednesday at O’Hare airport, they measured gusts of 58 mph which was the highest since 1991, coincidentally the year we moved to Chicago. In my neighborhood, gusts of 62 mph were observed and the average sustained wind speed was close to 30 mph. That, coupled with an extremely wet past couple of months led to this…

Down came a 20+yr old Colorado Blue Spruce that was just not able to handle the soggy soil and high sustained winds. Usually a spruce is able to adapt to most soil conditions, including a moderate tolerance to flooding. They also withstand wind better than most other spruces because of a moderately deep root system and they make good privacy shields because of their density.

We knew this was a wet area in the yard because of its proximity to the swale and raised it up when planting to help with drainage.  For over 20 years it did just fine. But, water soaked soil is definitely not as strong as dry, and it was no match for sustained high winds.  The same thing happened to our neighbor’s tree in an area that was also frequently wet.

We had the guys with chain saws come out to remove it.

And now part of our privacy shield has a gaping hole in a pretty ugly part of the yard.

Before:

After:

and the next day when winter reappeared for a last gasp in March.  Not nearly as bad as the East coast, but still an unwelcome last gasp.

Yikes!  These pictures remind me a bit of before and after weight loss ads. Not really fair because of the different seasons, but you get the idea. I need to think on this for a little bit about what to put in.  I don’t usually think it’s a good idea to replace a lost garden planting with the same item since there’s a reason it didn’t work out. It also a really disappointing loss since to the left of the shed is where we lost a 20+ year Freeman Maple tree a couple of years ago (read about it here).

So how much rain have I received this year so far?  Since I like knowing the amount of rain in my yard, not just the very large general Chicago area, in a previous post How Much Rain Did We Get? I described measuring rain with best rain gauge around, a Stratus Rain Gauge.  I keep track of the rain and snow in a great app “Rain Log” and this is my data for February and March.

We are way ahead of average for the year!  Normally we would get about 5 inches to date and we’ve already had over 8 inches of rain, in a few very soaking rain events.

Want to track the weather close to your own house?  Check out my favorite local weather sites that gather information from thousands of citizen scientists who report their weather every day at WeatherUnderground and CoCoRaHS.