EVER GREENS

September 19, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Conifers are a terrific addition to any garden or landscape.

Chicago Tribune

Conifers are wonderful plants — attractive, hardy, functional. They’re terrific additions to any garden or landscape. Really.

You may look around your neighborhood and laugh, seeing that 60-foot pine tree that dominates a neighbor’s front yard.

And therein lies the problem with conifers. We don’t know how to use them.

“People don’t like conifers because after 10 years, they’re saying, ‘Why is it dying at the bottom, why are they brushing my windows?,’ and so on,” says Richard L. Bitner, a writer, photographer and conifer expert who teaches at Pennsylvania’s Longwood Gardens. “So we need to make better choices.”

A smart start is a good reference book. Bitner’s “Timber Press Pocket Guide to Conifers” (Timber Press, $19.95) is the right first step for anyone contemplating the use of conifers. It describes hundreds of them, which may surprise some people too.

“Part of the problem,” Bitner says, “is the availability. The local nurseries have been providing the same 10 conifers forever, regardless of where you live and where you’re trying to grow them. The same ones are everywhere. We have to do our homework and decide, yes, this plant is right for my garden. But then we have to ask the nursery people to get it for us.”

Conifers make great accent pieces in gardens — they come in all shapes and sizes and a variety of colors — and are a must for the well-landscaped lot. They can be shaped into hedges or topiaries. Dwarf varieties also work in containers or troughs, and new cultivars are coming along all the time.

As you ponder which conifer to buy, think ahead. You’re planting them for the long run, so you need to know their growth rate and ultimate size. Skip this part, and you end up with that out-of-scale 60-foot pine tree dwarfing everything else.

Another consideration: climate change.

“We need to plan for that,” Bitner says. “When we plant a conifer, we’re not going to move it next year. It’s not a salvia. It’s not something we’re going to shift around. Many conifers will live hundreds of years. ... I’m encouraging people not to plant a lot of spruces and firs these days because they’re from higher altitudes, cold areas.”

Once you know what you want, the rest is a breeze. Conifers aren’t difficult to plant or maintain.

“They’re fairly easy to grow, compared to a lot of herbaceous plants we try to grow,” Bitner says. “They’re not fussy about the soil, generally speaking, and they’re actually more versatile than many people think.”