Living Fences™ made of ornamental evergreens such as Hollies, Leyland Cypress and Green Giant Arborvitae. Instead of using hard goods such as metal or wood fences for screens in the landscape, these natural barriers create privacy, shade and closure to your landscape. Evergreens are an excellent biomass filter, producing oxygen and helping to reduce your carbon footprint.
When shopping for a Christmas tree at your local lot or tree farm, you’ll likely encounter many different types of evergreen Christmas trees. Picking out a perfect tree isn't easy. A tree's scent, color, strength of branches, shape, height and needle retention all matter. Depending on where you live will determine what type of trees … Continue reading Evergreen Christmas Tree Guide: What is the best?
Walking the fields to find the perfect live Christmas tree has become a tradition for many families. Not only is the tree an important part of the holidays, but garland, misteltoe and wreaths as well. The bright red berries of the Holly trees look stunning against the green backdrop of leaves and needles in our … Continue reading Holiday Holly Tree Berry-Best Practices
In our last blog, we talked about soil types affecting the availability and uptake of plant nutrients. Sandy soils , which drain quickly, may not have sufficient N, P and K due to leaching, as the water rapidly leaves a sand area. Over the years rains can remove a lot of nutrients from a porous area to the garden. Regular watering is needed to establish new trees and may move materials away also, from sandy planting mix. If you could see a cross section of the soil draining, the water you are applying moves rapidly out of the sand in a more pointed, dagger like profile.
Early spring is the time to fertilize the evergreen trees of your privacy screen. Visiting our clients sites over the last 3 years, we see most Living Fence evergreens need fertilization. The past few rainy years has most likely leached most of the nitrogen from our garden soils. One year we even had 70 … Continue reading Evergreen Tree Fertilization
Fall is a great time for planting. As temperatures cool, transplanting is less stressful on plants as they slowly become dormant with less new growth,
The largest evergreen trees for privacy screening that we grow and transplant, are 15 feet tall Thuja Green Giant Arborvitaes. For almost 40 years we have successfully planted large green giant privacy screens throughout the Baltimore/Washington area. Our green giant trees are grown from rooted cuttings at Pryor's Nursery in Damascus, Maryland. On our website we … Continue reading How Tall Are The Evergreen Trees We Grow Locally?
Early this spring a client asked me to plant our Nellie Stevens Holly trees to form a privacy screen at his place in Oxford, Maryland. Wow!! Oxford Maryland, home of the original Nellie Stevens Holly, is where ~ 100 years ago, gardener Nellie R. Stevens experimented with holly cross breeding and cultivated a new variety which … Continue reading Home of the Original Nellie Stevens Holly
At our evergreen tree farm, we experimented with different soil types and potting mixtures over 20 years ago for organic soil amendments. Leafgro, which is manufactured by the state of Maryland, proved to be an excellent addition to the planting medium. Made of leaves and grass clippings collected from the surrounding cities, it is professionally … Continue reading Organic Soil Amendments
The Nellie Stevens is denser than most upright pyramidal hollies. It responds well to pruning, creating additional lateral tip buds at each pruning cut. Nellie Stevens hollies tolerate wet feet well. At our evergreen tree farm in Damascus, Maryland, the clay soils are often super saturated through the winter but the Nellie Stevens holly is able to grow in these conditions.
The late spring is the time every year when the Nellie Stevens holly creates new berries. The hollies are cross pollinated by the bees. Hollies that have pollinated flowers will develop small green berries that will grow and become red in the fall.