In some tropical countries they form forests in the same way maple trees do for us. These beautiful plants produce clumps of strong canes to carry their leaves and stay green all year round. These are the Bamboo Plants, which are really a giant kind of grass that almost never flowers. In warmer areas however grasses figured out how to keep their stems alive all year and started to behave like trees. They can be the wheat and corn we eat, or the grass on our lawns. Everyone is familiar with grasses, which produce their stalks each year and then die down leaves in the winter. There are many plants like this, from azalea and boxwood to holly, and they come in all sizes with some of them being big enough to be considered trees. This means there is no time of year where there are no leaves on these plants, but otherwise they have flowers and fruits in the same way as deciduous plants do.

The second group are usually called broad-leaf evergreens because they are pretty much like other trees and shrubs except that they only lose their leaves after new ones are made, not before like many trees do. Every fall it turns lovely yellow and brown shades before shedding its leaves for the winter as if it was a maple tree. A few are what are often called ‘deciduous conifers’ and the most notable is the Bald Cypress, which naturally grows in wet soil, but which will be happy in ordinary, reasonably moist soil too.

These plants have narrow leaves that are sometimes like the needles on a pine and other times more scaly and flat against the stem like a cypress, with several kinds in-between as well. Without junipers there would be no martinis. Perhaps the most famous are the juniper ‘berries’ that are used in cooking venison and even more in flavoring gin. Some like pine cones are well known, but other conifers produce much smaller seed structures that can look a bit like strange hard berries. These are interesting plants that don’t have flowers but instead produce cones of different kinds. Firstly there are the conifers, or needle evergreens, plants like cypress, pine and juniper. There are several distinct groups of evergreens. In winter being able to see the ‘bones’ of the garden means there is still some interest and color at that quiet time of the year. That is when evergreens really stand out as the best solution.Īs well, when constructing interesting and varied gardens, dense, rich green plants that give permanence and structure to the scene are essential. You may be able to get a nice dense screen for half the year from a deciduous planting, but in winter when everything is bare that screen suddenly becomes a gossamer curtain and hides nothing at all. This is especially true when you want privacy. As interesting and beautiful as deciduous plants can be, there are often situations when developing your property where only plants that stay green all year will do.

Tree seedlings zone 6