Evergreens

What’s growing in the area: Russian thistle in low spot, tumble and tansy mustard, stickseed, some grasses

In my yard: First winecup leaf, one sea pink.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, bougainvillea, Christmas cactus.

Animal sightings: Rabbit out at daybreak; birds singing when I left for work Thursday.

Weather: Most mornings about 30, yesterday afternoon close to 60; last rain 02/28/09; 11:42 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Our local hardware has two mature evergreens for sale, an Austrian Pine and a green spruce. I suspect they’re left over from Christmas, but they could be new arrivals.

One wonders who they think will buy them. Anyone with the heavy equipment necessary to plant them in frozen ground, probably also has the ability to dig up free piñon or juniper bushes he knows will grow here.

Still landscape evergreens have been popular in this country since the wealthy tried to recreate European gardens on their American estates. At The Breakers, completed for Cornelius Vanderbilt II in 1895, Ernest Bowditch used trees to screen the property from neighbors, hedges of Japanese yew and Pfitzer juniper to line the walks, and informal plantings of other evergreens, including arborvitae.

A decade or so later, Vanderbilt’s 13 acre estate had become a model for the next generation of wealth. William Miller suggested those who wanted to copy English gardens should use hedges of Japanese yew in place of the European variety that wouldn’t grow in New England, while those who preferred Italian gardens should substitute arborvitae for the columnar cypresses. By then, Bowditch’s brother James was the primary supplier of Japanese yew.

A few years later, Miller moved to Illinois where farmers were using spirea to hide the high foundations required by coal furnaces. He suggested they substitute Japanese barberry or use native shrubs and vines to "harmonize a house with nature."

While Miller couldn’t convince farmers to replace their spirea, the diffusion of The Breakers aesthetic did spread to middle class suburbs in the 1920's where it merged with the desire for foundation planting. People used tall evergreens at the corners of their houses and near their entrances, and filled the space between with the low growing juniper or yew that then filled the nursery catalogs.

New styles didn’t reach this area until after World War II. The first places built in the village were square, flat-roofed cinder block houses like those found in Los Alamos, with traditional plantings. However, by the middle-1950's, a few had bought land beyond the village and were building low, horizontal homes that used stone façades and low-pitched roofs.

The inbred fear of fire and vermin prevented them from using foundation plantings, but they did use evergreens to mark the front entrance or frame the picture window. Occasionally, someone then or since has planted a low growing evergreen as a specimen in front of one of those ranch houses. With time, they’ve taken on the character of old Japanese shrubs.

Sometime later people planted formal hedges like those of The Breakers along their driveways. Many live in doublewides, but one has a two-story house built in the 1950's or early 1960's. Deciduous shrubs like forsythia and rose of Sharon have been used for hedges at the front road.

More recently, people have returned to the Italian style, with arborvitae used everywhere on property boundaries. In keeping with their European influenced petit McMansions, the white cedar is usually widely spaced to suggest a formal garden, rather than closely planted for privacy.

One lane wandering from the main road towards the river has a mix of the old and new. At the corner, the front yard of a house built between the wars, is filled with tall piñon. Farther back, on the same side, another field has also been planted with piñon and the rest remains vacant.

On the other side of the road, which may have marked the boundary between farms, four newer houses use evergreens as privacy screens. One has 6' shrubs scrambling in front of a stuccoed wall, and two have rows of tightly planted trees.

My favorite place is the one on the corner where a tall English hedge stands between the house and road. At one end, a formal gate with a solid wooden door connects the two areas. The public side was probably once a garden, but now is left to pigweed and áñil del muerta.

On the other side, all I can see is the tall piñon at one end and the shorter pine at the other evoking the frame produced by foundation evergreens. Behind it, one wonders if the same person or same house still exists there, for the Santa Fe adobe revival house has a high stucco wall in front with only the slightest bit of landscaping hidden behind. It’s possible the hedge survives, still carefully pruned, from a house contemporary with the one with piñon across the road.

One reason Miller suggested people should consider using evergreens was "they make a garden beautiful and comfortable in winter," no small feat in this area where drying winds bronze the arborvitae and batter the Japanese honeysuckle. This hedge is always the same, always there, always blue. It’s that illusion of consistency that provides the consolation that this winter, like those past, can be endured.

Notes:
Bowditch, James. Advertisements for Hiti Nursery in The National Nurseyman, 1909, available on-line.

Bush-Brown, Louise and James Bush-Brown. America’s Garden Book, 1939, on foundation planting and nursery catalogs.

Miller, Wilhelm. "Long-Lived Evergreens for Gardens," The Garden Magazine 15:310-313:1912.

_____. The "Illinois way" of Beautifying the Farm, 1914.

Photograph: Evergreen hedge with piñon at left and pine at right; pigweed and áñil del muerta in front; 7 February 2010.