Today we're on a field trip. We are at the trial gardens for the Proven Winners Color Choice shrubs. Hi, I'm Heidi from Garden Crossings and today we're going to go tour around these gardens and check out all of the various evergreens.
In addition to that, we're going to be doing a product review which is great for being out in the garden during the winter. So let's go ahead and take a walk through these gardens, check out the different sizes, textures, and shapes of some of these wonderful evergreen shrubs. We're going to start right off with a new shrub for 2025. This is the Arborvitae Whip It. Whip It Good. And I just, I love the texture and the form of this particular Arborvitae or Thuja.
It has kind of that weeping, trailing kind of habit to it. This plant, when it's mature, can get three to five foot tall. So don't let its compact size right now fool you.
This definitely can get to be a very nice size evergreen shrub. This is hardy in zones three to seven so this is going to be a selection for more of our cooler or northern gardeners and it's just it's such a nice soft texture to it and I just I love how that just kind of wings out sort of and just has this really beautiful look and feel to it. So whip it good coming in 2025. So for those of you who have grown boxwood and are just not happy with how they're performing maybe they're starting to get a little bit of that boxwood blight. that is in some areas, there is an alternative for you and it's actually an Ilex. Here we have an Ilex called Strong Box.
This is an evergreen and it looks a lot like those boxwoods. It's got the nice small foliage on it, kind of that nice soft feel. This Ilex can be trimmed into hedges.
You can trim them into like circular balls or that flat wall look, kind of like you've seen people do with boxwood before. Strongbox is hardy in zones 5 to 9 and it gets 2 to 3 foot tall and 2 to 3 foot wide. This is a deer resistant shrub so you don't have to worry about the deer browsing and doing the pruning for you.
They should typically just stay away. This also is a native shrub variety which is nice for those of us who are looking to add some more natives into our garden. These like to be grown in a full sun to part shade location.
There's others in this series. It's an Ilex glabra. There's also squeeze box and gem box.
Those are some other names that might be familiar to you. But I would say these are probably a pretty full grown size specimen. So if you're looking to add something that's, you know, just about three foot or so, this is great for foundation plantings.
If you have a porch and you're looking for something evergreen to go kind of right in front of your porch. strong box would be a great selection for an area just like that. So when you're looking at evergreen color for the winter season, it isn't always like your typical evergreens, your pines, your thuyas, that kind of thing. Here we have the Pieris interstellar and this is a gorgeous winter plant. Look at these beautiful red little clusters here.
Eventually this plant is going to be loaded with beautiful red blooms that turn to pink. This usually happens Early in the season, so it's just waiting for it to happen. We notice it usually around early spring, especially in the greenhouse when these things are taking off. We can even see it blooming in February in the greenhouse. This plant is hardy in zones 5 to 8. It is deer resistant, so if you're looking for something that the deer will tend to stay away from.
this shouldn't be a problem so pierce interstellar is hardy in zones five to eight and it only gets three to four foot tall and three to four foot wide so a fairly compact shrub this would be another great one that you could use as a foundation planting around the base of your house or if you have a porch or something this would be a nice plant that would just give you that consistent look year round because it doesn't lose its leaves here we have a japanese holly this one is called skybox And I've often myself wondered what does skybox look like at maturity and this here is a mature plant. Skybox is hardy in zones five to eight. It gets four to five foot tall and about three about two to three foot wide. This is the perfect evergreen shrub if you're just looking to add like some column or have it into the landscape. Or this would also be a really nice plant if you were looking to do like a patio container and wanted something just tall and columnar that could kind of maybe flank the entrance of your house.
Skybox would be a perfect addition. Another great deer-resistant evergreen is the Trace Amigos Abelia, and I am just loving the new foliage color or the new growth foliage color on the Trace Amigos. You'll notice the leaves are green with a nice creamy edge, but all of the new growth on it is Green with almost a burnt orange or fiery red edge.
Trace Amigos is hardy in the zone 6 to 9, and it's 2 to 3 foot tall, and it can get up to 5 foot wide at maturity. As mentioned, it's deer resistant. also the little flowers on it that appear during the summer attract the butterflies and the hummingbirds to the garden. So if you're looking for beautiful foliage, wow, I just love the fantastic fall colors that the Trace Amigos Abelia puts on.
Pyrocolomelis Berry Box is a really cool winter interest evergreen, not only because it's got that foliage that lasts throughout the winter, but check out these red berries. I love any shrub that shows these red berries in the winter. It just adds such a beautiful pop of color, especially like we get winter here and the snow. The red berries always look so pretty.
Now, I know I just said we get winter here. Everybody gets winter, but we get those beautiful snow dustings that really make the red berries pop. Berry box is hardy in zones 7 to 8, although it may be hardy in zones 6B. We are actually a zone 6a, but because we are near the river right now, we're kind of in a little bit of a microclimate, which helps this plant with overwintering better than if it were just kind of out in the open.
So these beautiful berries appear in the late fall winter. This is a deer-resistant shrub, and just it's kind of a, I don't know, I think it's a shrub that you would need to have like the perfect... place for it because it does have a little bit of a messy habit in my opinion. But you could trim these, you know, tall branches back and get it so it's a little bit nicer and tighter feeling if you wanted to have more of that lower growing feeling ground cover with the benefit of the red berries. So as mentioned earlier in the video, we're going to be doing a product review today as well.
And actually that product review is this gorgeous black coat I'm wearing. Not only is it a nice winter coat, it is a heated... winter coat. So there are six heating zones within this coat.
There is the back of the neck, the back, the arms, and then in the front. So this coat is keeping me nice and toasty right now as we're out here battling not only the cold, but the wind as well. So there are three temperature settings and I'm going to show you. There's an on off switch here. You just do a long three second press to turn it on.
and then you press it again and again to get your high, your medium, and your low settings. In this coat, there is also a battery, which obviously you've got to have something to run the heating element, and there's a nice little pocket here that the battery goes into. It's just a nice battery here.
You turn it on, and it runs for up to seven hours if you're running your coat on the low setting. So a typical run time would be three to seven hours, depending on how long you're out. and also what temperature you're having your coat be running at.
So now the nice thing, too, about this battery is not only is it great for keeping this coat running and warm, it's also a nice battery backup if you want to hook your phone up to it to charge your phone as well. This battery is 1600 milliampere. Most of these coats or heated devices are only 10,000, so the extra milliampers extends the heating time that you can be out wearing this coat. We're going to be putting a 10% code below along with a link if you are interested in more information on this heated coat. I highly recommend it.
It's waterproof, which is great, especially if you're out in the snow. Also, it's fairly windproof. I'm really not feeling a lot of wind coming through the coat. So that's been nice as well. So you don't have to use it as a battery heating coat.
You can just wear it for a nice winter coat if it's not that cold and you're not feeling you need that extra heat. But I just, I love the design, the style of this coat, so many pockets and it's been wonderful for out doing these garden tours today. One of my favorite evergreens is the polar gold thuja and it's because of that bright yellow foliage. Polar gold Gold can get 10 to 15 foot tall and you can see this one here is probably reaching about 10 foot tall or so.
It's got a nice pyramidal shape. Polar gold is hardy in zones 3 to 8 and can get 12 to 15 foot tall and about 4 to 6 foot wide. This is a native shrub with its beautiful golden foliage.
So if you're looking to break up your garden just a little bit, especially if you do have a lot of evergreens that you're using, the polar gold's yellow coloration will just help add dimension and color into the wintertime garden so it's oftentimes hard to find that perfect evergreen shrub for shade areas in the garden well here we have a taxis and this is a perfect shrub for full sun or full shade it's evergreen It's got very short needles and they're soft as well so that it's not like it's a pokey kind of plant. This one here is called the Stonehenge. It is hardy in zones four to seven and it can get upwards of ten foot tall at maturity but it is very narrow only reaching two to three foot wide so if you're looking for that columnar shrub for your sun or shade locations this Taxus definitely is the one for you. got a nice kind of pillory-ish habit to it.
Arborvitae Thinman is a truly unique and different looking Thuja or Arborvitae. So I wanted to get in the picture here just so you could kind of get a reference to the size of this plant. I'm 5'9 and right now this one's probably about six or seven foot tall.
So Thinman is a very skinny, tall columnar Arborvitae. I love how they add so much unique like architectural... interest into the garden, especially if you don't have big spaces in your garden and you're just looking to add a fun columnar look.
So Thin Man is an evergreen, obviously, with the beautiful green foliage. Thin Man is full of the Full Speed of Hedges series, which is a fast-growing tree series, and their hardyton zone is three to eight. They can get 12 to 15 foot tall and two to three foot wide at maturity. These are a native shrub that likes to be grown in full sun to part shade areas.
This is something that definitely I could wrap my arm around. What do you think about adding it to your garden? So as mentioned earlier on the video, we are in a trial garden right now and pretty much this whole garden is surrounded in some form by fencing.
So this is kind of a newer addition. You'll notice they have this eight foot tall black chain link fence and that's to keep the deer off this property. If you're doing trials, you need to see what the plant can do.
And if you have deer coming in on the property, constantly munching them down, it really doesn't give you a good chance to see the full potential of various shrubs. So this chain link fence was put in, and I think being black like that, it just really blends into the landscape. So it's not like it stands out and seems predominant when you're looking in this garden. Really, most of the time you can hardly see it.
But one thing I did want to point out are these beautiful evergreen trees behind the fence. Those those are part of the full speed of hedge. Those are the American Pillar Arborvitaes. And before this fence was put in, this was a solid mass of Arborvitaes. So it created a really nice privacy, natural privacy look.
So when the fence got put in, they weren't sure if they wanted to keep these trees here or not. So gradually they've been doing various things. So between each of these trees, I believe there was...
probably two or three additional trees to give that nice tight feel. So they first started off by just removing kind of every, you know, two trees, leaving one onwards with the pattern to see if that's what they liked. Wasn't sure if that was what he liked, so then he went ahead and trimmed up these trees. So again, these are American Pillars, they're Arborvitaes. Typically Arborvitae has evergreen from the very bottom of the plant to the very tip.
But they got trimmed up about seven or so foot, creating more of a tree-like look. And to be honest, I think it's kind of cool. I think it adds a little bit of whimsy, a little bit of fun. And I just love how it creates a very predominant kind of, I don't know if you want to call it a border, or I'm at a lack of words for what I want to call it. But I am just loving what he's done with these American Pillars by trimming them up and creating this fun-looking...
border in this garden. What do you think about that? Like, would you like to see the American pillars from top to bottom full of foliage or do you like the fact that they were trimmed up a little bit to give them more of a tree shape appearance? If you have any questions or comments on any of the evergreens that we've seen today in this tour, please feel free to leave it in the comments below.
We're also going to put links below so that if you want more information or more pictures of these plants, you can head to our website GardenCrossings.com and check out all of the information. Garden Crossings is an online garden center so we can ship all of these beautiful plants directly to your door.