Sanhedrin Nursery – Garden Blog

• Choose living Christmas trees now. Most will be able to be kept in their containers and used for one or two more years as a Christmas tree. Water them every other day while indoors.

• Clean up rose bushes by removing spent flowers and raking up old leaves, but wait until February for heavy pruning.

• Primroses and pansies will add color to your flower beds and containers all winter.

• Wild bird feeders will attract migrating birds so you can enjoy the pleasure of their company.

• Fragrant daphne is an early blooming shrub that will delight you with its strongly scented blooms each spring. Plant it in well-drained soil.

Enjoy the beauty of conifers

Conifers, or cone bearing trees, make up the most valuable softwood forests of the world. They also include some of our most beautiful landscape trees. Pines, firs, spruces and cedars make fine backdrops for colorful deciduous trees and shrubs.

The true fir trees are not related to our Douglas fir, and are known by the name Abies. These trees typically have a formal and stately appearance when young, growing into impressive, majestic specimens.

The White Fir is native to the mountains of southern Oregon and California. It is an important timber tree and a popular Christmas tree as well. It’s bluish-green needles stand upright on the branches, and the cones may be dark purple or bright yellow-green.

The Noble Fir grows from northern California on up into Washington. It forms a tall and narrow pyramid with short, stiff branches and bluish-green needles that sweep upwards.

The Grand Fir grows near the Pacific coast from California to British Columbia. It is a grand and imposing tree with handsome, deep green needles that are fragrant when crushed.

Spruce trees make very fine ornamental trees. The Colorado Blue Spruce is well-known as a living Christmas tree. It has very stiff, horizontal branches which easily hold up the ornaments. Foliage varies in seedling trees from dark green through all shades of blue green to steel blue. It makes a fine landscape tree in our area, with branches that grow all the way to the ground.

Cedar is a name given to many different trees, like the Deodar Cedar and the native Incense Cedar. The Deodar Cedar makes a beautiful, large tree with silvery needles and openly spaced, graceful, upturned branches. The cones are very decorative and look like wood roses.

Incense Cedar is a dense, symmetrical tree with reddish brown bark. Its rich green foliage grows in flat sprays and gives off a pungent fragrance in warm weather.

There are three types of conifers known as redwoods: our native Coast Redwood trees, the Giant Sequoia, native to the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and the Dawn Redwood, which comes from China. They are all beautiful large trees. The Dawn Redwood is unusual in that its lovely, light green foliage turns light bronze in autumn before it drops from the tree, remaining bare all winter.

Just as many shades of green make up an artist’s palette, many varieties of conifers can add year-round beauty to your property. This is an excellent time to choose and plant conifers.