Junipers

I'm not crazy about junipers as landscape plants -- they're so rough looking, so coarse. But in Santa Fe, their dry-loving tough ways are winning me over. We have several low spreaders in the front and side yards.

They are green and bulky and do a good job of adding deep color to the dry winter gray-brown scene. It appears they grow with or without water. Without ANY water in this dry winter.

We also have a narrow upright juniper by the garage that is weird. Columnar junipers can be tall and very narrow, and this one is canted over. When we moved in, it had bulky branches all the way down and was bottom heavy.

I limbed it up and cut off a lot of side branches on the left. You can't really prune junipers for regrowth. What is cut off stays cut and does not regrow. I ended up liking the rough, open bare stem.

This juniper grows in a circle of about 8 inches of soil. Hardscape, driveway, garage structure and impermeable patio stones surround it for many yards. It literally has only inches of soil around the trunk. How does this even grow?

That's the thing about junipers, they'll grow in incredibly tough conditions.

I just bought a new one to plant out by the back fence. This is 'Skyrocket', a very narrow blue(ish) upright juniper -- Juniperus scopulorum.  Here it is, a small new transplant against the brown Virginia creeper vine in March. Eventually it will be taller than the height of the fence.

There was just something depressing about the brown vine on the brown coyote fence all winter as seen from my bedroom sliding glass door across the deck. I needed something -- anything -- to look at in winter. But with only a few feet between the deck and the fence, there was no room for a specimen plant or anything that could hide the brown vine.

A juniper turned out to be the answer. 'Skyrocket' is narrow (only three or maybe four feet wide at maturity). It's evergreen, with a bit of a blue tint. It will fit here and stay upright, and from the sliding glass door, there will be something to look at in winter other than the expanse of brown along the flat fence.

When the yellow flowered potted witch hazel at the corner of the deck fills in more, it will be a nice vignette with the evergreen / blue juniper. A single skinny juniper tree won't really hide the fence, but it does distract the eye. Unlike the tall tilted juniper by the garage door, I won't limb this one up. I'll leave the shrubby branches at the bottom to disguise the fence.

'Skyrocket' juniper is coarse looking, it's uprightly odd shaped . . .  everything a juniper aspires to be. I like it each time I glance out the door to the back courtyard.

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