Umbrella Pines
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- February
- 12
Evergreens are the real workhorses of the winter garden, offering color and texture when not much else is around. Give them a coating of snow and you’ve got a truly stellar plant in the cold landscape.
Ordinary cedars, junipers, spruces and pines are fine, but if you want something a lot more interesting you can’t go wrong with a Japanese umbrella pine (Sciadopitys verticillata).
The needlelike leaves of this ornamental pine are significantly wider and thicker than other pines. Clustered together in whorls, the dark green needles do indeed look like the spokes of an open umbrella. The glossy foliage looks particularly good in the harsh light of winter.
Here are a few shots of a gorgeous umbrella pine in Pepe Maynard’s Bedford garden.
This slow-growing conifer is rarely seen in the landscape taller than 20 to 30 feet. It maintains a nice pyramidal shape as it grows.
Umbrella pines are hardy to Zone 5, but they prefer a slightly protected spot in a more temperate climate. They grow best in full sun in rich acidic soil that’s moist but well drained.
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, February 12th, 2008 at 2:41 pm by Bill Cary.
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Bill Cary grew up in Louisville, Ky. His gardening was limited to growing parsley and impatiens on the windowsill of Manhattan walkups until the mid-1990s when he bought a rundown old chicken farm on 8 acres in the Hudson Valley. Now he spends his weekends chasing deer, hacking away at invasive shrubs and vines and wondering why he doesn`t have more meadow and less lawn.
