Iseli, Buchholz, Wells and a few other west coast nursery's are my sources for the rare and unusual. I add 4-5 a year to my collection this way. I am only talking about the rare and hard to find. I tend to wait for them to show up in person at my local source before I make the purchase. Shoved the something unique aside and now wanting "the more rare conifers." Gee whass, you haven't been collecting a year and you are already eclipsed the old tried and true anchors in the trade. I'll start with Picea abies 'Summer Daze' Now its all about the more rare conifers. With that said here are five cultivar's that have a unique feature. Your plants now have to bring something unique to the table and need to differentiate themselves for the other like cultivars. You've already explored all the local nurseries now you're using mutliple mail order sources for your plants. Tsuga canadensis 'Vermeulen's Wintergold'Īs a collector you want everything but space is coming at a premium. You know find cultivars that flush different colors or even turn gold in winter! With that said here are five cultivars one can likely find locally but might have a to drive an extra hour to find. You start seeking additional nurseries that may have more selection. Now you start looking for plants that might be slower growing. You sure do like them and can see why they might have classic status but they potentially take alot of room. Now that you're getting in a groove and liking the low maintenance aspect of conifers you probably thinking quite a bit about the plants you already have. With that said here are the five cultivars a newbie can probably attain in a decent size, for a decent price and most improtantly get locally. Size of plant, budget and local availabity are probably key elements. At the end of the day I'm hoping to add some top shelf cultiars to my wishlist that I may not have heard of.Īs a newbie your probably thinking about season long color and screening. Share your thoughts, share your cultivar suggestions and we'll see where it takes us.
As the collection grows I can tell I'm getting more fussy about what I chose so I started thinking about some of the star cultivars and how one progresses into these confiers. I got permission from his family btw.I'm not even 1 year into conifer collecting and I have more cultivars than I would have ever expected. It contained a few pages of notes, some of which I'm posting here for posterity. He was a noted conifer expert and professor at the University of Utah, who, btw, happened to post years ago on gardenweb as pinetree30 IIRC. I work in IT and peripherally cyber security so it would be hard to fool me, and it was!Īnyhow I had a very happy co-incidence recently of buying a used copy of 'Conifers Around the World' that happened to have been Dr. Otherwise I might have gone on posting for years with anything slightly acerbic or (justifiably) critical going into a black hole. Looks like it only started in the past several months fortunately. But no one else on the internet can see it. They can make your post appear to you AND your followers, so it seems as though nothing is amiss to anyone likely to notice and inform you. I decided to stop participating at Gardenweb/Houzz because they've given some robo-Karen access to a particularly insidious form of shadow banning.