Our Plant for That posting of the week – per our audience’s request – circles back to Combinations.  One area of focus that our office has had a number of conversations about is how this past winter has impacted the evergreens in our landscapes.

While we are grateful for this past Sunday’s rainfall, the ripple effects of our cold, dry, windy winter are revealing themselves as spring unfolds. We’ve seen significant die back in a number of evergreens and the Flash Freeze we had in mid December of severe, below zero temperatures contributed to their demise. Unfortunately, in many instances we will have no other choice but to get the impacted plants out of the landscape and begin anew.

Here is one idea of a planting combination that may be the starting point for a new planting involving Fairview Juniper. Fairview is an upright, informal evergreen that withstood the onslaught of our Great Plains climatic conditions this past winter. Using nature as our teacher, we like to be responsive to her lessons and now consider Fairview Juniper to be an even more durable contributor in our plant evaluations.

Take a look at the following simple design that utilizes Fairview Juniper as a backdrop. The other plant material folded into the composition plays off of this very informal “green screen” presenting more of a Nebraska-Style planting combination.

As the weeks and months go by we certainly will remain students of the landscape in our responsiveness to all the conditions plants encounter. For the purpose of this post, we certainly consider Fairview Juniper to be one tough Plant for That.