Author: Dave Marciniak

What are those plants?

Culpeper County has been working hard to plant Virginia native plants around the county, so I made that a focus of this design. Here’s the plant list:

Willow Oak, Quercus phellos
St. Johns Wort, Hypericum spp.
Virginia Sweetspire, Itea virginica ‘Henry’s Garnet‘
Joe Pye Weed, Eupatorium purpureum ‘Baby Joe’
Blue False Indigo, Baptisia australis

How I got involved

Last year I was scrolling mindlessly through Facebook, as one does, and I saw the Star Exponent article about the new playground being built by Eastern View High School. What really caught my eye was the fact that it was designed as an inclusive playground, with equipment to allow kids with disabilities to have fun. I immediately reached out to the Parks and Rec department to find out if they needed landscaping.

Parks and Rec director John Barrett confirmed that yes, they could certainly use someone willing to donate the landscaping, so I volunteered. As you may recall, 2018 was a nightmare year for rain, and the project faced delay after delay. Kids were using the playground, but 2018 ended with the playground still waiting for plants.

Late this spring, we finally had some room open up in our schedule and we could do what we promised! It took us about a day to get everything in and mulched, and it looks great. Culpeper has been good to us, so it felt wonderful to give back.

The usual common name for Pieris japonica ‘Mountain Fire’ is Japanese Andromeda, which I will not use. I’ve never heard a homeowner call it “Andromeda”. I’ve heard pieris, I’ve heard japonica – that one’s fun, since there are a gazillion plants that are blahblah japonica – but never andromeda. Now you kids get off my lawn!

In all seriousness, I have always loved Pieris japonica ‘Mountain Fire’. Its eventual size is predictable, growing super slowly to a max of 6 to 8 feet tall and 3ish feet wide. It takes a good decade for it to crack 4 feet tall. Like I said, super slow. That’s a good thing in a lot of home landscapes.

What’s less predictable is what Pieris japonica ‘Mountain Fire’ will look like as it grows. These plants love being in the partial shade of a backyard with mature trees, but they’ll also grow in full sun. They need soil that drains well. That’s a more important consideration than exact light requirements. As with most plants, the more sun they get the fuller and bushier they’ll be. In the shade, they’ll get thin and woody and get a whole lot funkier looking. The ones shown above were planted in a spot where they got a decent amount of sun. You can see that the foliage is still pretty dense and they have similar shapes to one another. Now look at this one.

This is a Pieris japonica ‘Mountain Fire’ that’s grown up on the shady side of the house. It’s right at about 8 feet tall, but the trunks are visible and the shape is pretty cool.

Pieris japonica ‘Mountain Fire’ gets covered with clusters of hanging white blooms in the springtime.  It got the name ‘Mountain Fire’ because new growth comes in a beautiful red, fading to green over time.

Want to buy Pieris japonica ‘Mountain Fire’ in Virginia?

When I say “holly” it probably puts a very specific image in your mind: bright green, shiny leaves with lots of jagged edges, and bright red berries too. Compact Inkberry Holly (Ilex glabra ‘Compacta’) is different, with its dark green leaves and dark bluish purple berries.

Inkberries are American native shrubs. They also tolerate wet soils, making them one of the few evergreen shrubs that do. Inkberry holly can be planted in full sun to partial shade. They will grow in full shade, but they get super thin and woody. A great example of this is along Davis Street in Culpeper, down by the Depot. The inberry have grown large, but the foliage is just this thin “crust” of green along the outside of the plants.

Compact inkberry holly grows to 3 to 4 feet tall and 4 to 6 feet wide. It’s a good evergreen foundation plant as long as it won’t need sheared or hedged. Inkberry’s natural shape just looks better than anything you may force it to be. I also like to use it for massing, especially creating large drifts along the edge of the woodline. Deer tend to leave inkberry holly alone, so it’s a good plant for spots where deer are a concern but you don’t want to use boxwood.

Want to buy Compact Inkberry Holly in Virginia?

St Johns Wort (Hypericum ‘Hidcote’) is a plant I didn’t use a lot initially. Then we were asked to quote a landscape installation for a client in Great Falls. They had just completed a major addition, and the county required that they add a LOT of plants to offset the construction. The engineering firm’s drawings called for a whole lot of Hypericum ‘Hidcote’. 134 of them, in fact.

Hypericum ‘Hidcote’ (I’m not using the common name in this post because way too many plants fall under the umbrella of ‘St Johns Wort’) is a low growing deciduous shrub that grows to 2 to 4 feet tall and wide. It blooms yellow, with pretty showy flowers. It likes well draining soil, and we’ve had a lot of success with it in deer-heavy areas. In fact, in the project I mentioned above the deer completely ignored them.

If, like me, you’ve wondered what Saint John had to do with all this, some cultivars of Hypericum (probably not this one) were used to treat wounds and nasty infections for centuries. Presumably because it was such an important plant, the leaves were gathered and burned to help protect against evil spirits. This was done on – wait for it – the night before St. John’s Day. As someone for whom many prayers have been made to St. Jude (the patron saint of hopeless causes – no mom, no offense taken), this makes sense.

Want to buy Hypericum ‘Hidcote’ in Virginia?

I can only assume that there’s a clever link between Sixteen Candles Sweet Pepperbush (Clethra alnifolia ‘Sixteen Candles’) and the Molly Ringwold movie, but I’m an embarrassment to Gen X. I’ve never seen it. Haven’t even caught the movie between commercial breaks while flipping channels. What I DO know is that this Sweet Pepperbush is a great little Virginia native shrub that pollinators love.

If I can go on a tangent, the genus name Clethra comes from the Greek klethra. That means alder, and the leaves of Sweet Pepperbush resemble alder leaves. The species, alnifolia, means… leaves like alder. So the botanical name is essentially Alder McAlderbush. I retract any previous claims about botanical names not being stupid. Anyhow.

Clethra is a native shrub that will tolerate wet areas. In fact, wet spots in partial shade will make clethra very happy, although they will tolerate full sun. “Sixteen Candles’ grows to 3 to 5 feet tall. In the summertime you’ll see it covered in upright, long white blooms that look like candles. Probably more than sixteen of them, but I ain’t no scientitian. Clethra ‘Sixteen Candles’ also has a lovely compact growth habit, which is a nice contrast to some of the more loose and rangey plants out there.

Want to buy Sweet Pepperbush (Clethra alnifolia ‘Sixteen Candles) in Virginia?

Why do I love spreading Japanese plum yew (Cephalotaxus harringtonia ‘Prostrata’)? I grew up with the sandy soils of southeastern New England. That freely draining soil meant that yew bushes (Taxus spp.) did phenomenally well. The house I grew up in was a ranch built in the 1950s, with landscaping to match. On the corner of the garage was a yew bush that my dad kept sheared into a perfect, Roomba-looking disc. It was about 3 feet tall and easily 8 or 9 feet in diameter.

English yews don’t really care for our clay soils here in Virginia. I did a mass planting of them as part of a Culpeper winery landscape design, and while they’re still alive and kicking, they’ve barely gotten any bigger in the last several years. The deer also love munching on English yews. Luckily we have spreading Japanese plum yews.

Spreading Japanese plum yews have long, dark green glossy needles on gracefully arching branches. They’ll grow to 2 to 3 feet tall, with a spread of 4 to 5 feet. Their growth habit makes  them a terrific substitute for ‘Repandens’ English yews (Taxus baccata ‘Repandens’). I really do think that spreading Japanese plum yews are way underused in the landscape here in Virginia.

Want to buy spreading Japanese plum yew in Virginia?

Maybe I watched too many cartoons as a kid (not possible), but I have a thing for weird looking plants. Shaggy, weepy, contorted, twisted, it’s all good to me. Hinoki cypress (Chamecyparis obtusa ‘Gracilis’) scratches that itch, but it still has enough “normal” looking structure that it works in most landscapes. It’s a lovely dark green, so it doesn’t tend to scare off customers, either.

According to my plant nerd resources, “Hinoki” means “fire tree” in Japanese. If accurate, I can totally see it. If you did a quick flipbook of photos of similarly sized Hinoki cypresses, it would look like dancing flames. Hinoki cypress likes full sun to dappled shade, but I can tell you that it will actually grow in pretty deep shade. It won’t get much bigger than how it was at planting, and the foliage will thin, but you’ll end up with an even funkier looking tree with peeling, reddish brown bark.

In the typical suburban landscape, ‘Gracilis’ Hinoki cypress will eventually grow to 15 to 20 feet tall and a 6 to 10 foot spread, but don’t go buying that birdfeeder that hangs off a 10 foot rope. It’s a slow growing tree so it’s going to take some time to get there. Your landscape design will have plenty of time to fill in around it.

This cultivar was developed in Japan a long time ago. In the 1860s it was brought to Europe by Phillip Franz von Siebold, a German botanist. I love plants like this that must have seemed so unbelievably exotic when they first arrived in Europe. People like you and me have been nerding out over this for a long time, which I think is super cool.

Want to buy Hinoki Cypress in Virginia?

Every landscape designer wants their customers to be successful with their plantings. That can be hard when our clients want plants that are a little fussy or finicky. I like recommending nearly bulletproof plants like Kousa dogwood (Cornus kousa).

Kousa dogwood blooms in late spring, with loads of large, white flowers. After flowering, the tree sets small red fruits. The fall color is also a treat, with the green leaves turning reddish-purple as the season wears on. Kousa dogwoods work well for everything from planting along the woods’ edge to a focal point tree. Unlike native dogwoods, I’ve seen Kousa dogwoods thriving in full sun, as parking lot trees. That’s a tough tree!

Kousa dogwoods range in size from 15 to 30 ft tall and wide, depending on location.

Want to buy Kousa dogwood in Virginia?