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Posts Tagged ‘Plant spacing’

Big-leafed update

Posted in Arboriculture, Miscellaneous, Opportunistic plants, Plant spacing, Trees, tagged , , , , on October 11, 2013| 4 Comments »

Last week I drove past the Paulownias I wrote about in 2009, and realized that they deserved another blog post.  In the four years since that post, all three trees have shot up.  

I kept trying to shoot an image with the two paired trees in it, minus the utility lines, but it wasn’t doable without risking life and limb.  The trees have grown higher than the house and the utility lines, and have easily tripled (at least) in size.

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Two paulownias planted four years ago now shade almost the entire front yard.

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The smaller of the two trees measures perhaps 12″ DBH.  The once-sunny walkway is now almost entirely shaded.

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It’s a little tricky to see, but the right-hand tree is larger than the one to the left.  Directly behind it stands a large Japanese maple; in the 2009 post you can see the maple’s fall color, and compare its trunk size to the now-towering Paulownia’s. 

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Crowding the bed

Posted in Plant selection, Plant spacing, tagged , , , on September 11, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Harvard University has recently been building on Memorial Drive, along the Charles River. The site that had held a garden center (most recently, Mahoney’s, and before that, the Grower’s Market, where I sold Christmas trees one year) is now becoming a park and a graduate student dormitory. The dorm is done; the park (originally slated for a Renzo Piano museum building) is still apparently in construction.

The other day I was strolling past the parcels, and had to stop to look at a planting buffering one of the dorm’s corners. It was so rich-looking, so dense and lush, and yet it stood only a few feet high. Fantastic! What was it?

Two feet high, with thick foliage making a bumper at the building's base.

Three feet high, with thick foliage making a bumper at the building's base.

I leaned in to take a look, and discovered that it was a mass of Fothergilla, a shrub related to Hamamelis, or Witch Hazel.  (I thought at first that it was Hamamelis, wrote and posted an entire blog post on it, and then realized a few days later that I’d been mistaken.  So consider this post a corrective to the other one, which I’ve now taken down.)

I figure that these are Fothergilla gardenii, or Dwarf Fothergilla, given their spacing and configuration.  The plants in this mass are set on 18-24″ centers.  That’s quite close even for a dwarf plant that’s recorded to grow to between three and six feet in height.

Spacing between 18 and 24 inches on center.

Spacing between 18 and 24 inches on center.

We have discussed plant spacing issues in TakingPlace, and have talked about the differing (and equally viable) strategies of planting close versus planting to make each plant a specimen. The jostling that plants do with each other when planted close can make for an interesting and complex arrangement.

Fothergilla gardenii is a suckering shrub that tends to form thickets; perhaps the landscape architect was aiming for a full-thicket look right from the start.  It’ll be interesting to see how the planting grows, and what forms the plants can negotiate in this circumstance (will they be able to sucker where light appears not to reach the ground inside the mass?).

Michael Van Valkenburgh, landscape architect of record for this Harvard site, is known for using close plantings in his projects, and he’s generally pretty horticulturally astute. This planting represents an interesting experiment, one worth revisiting over time to see how it progresses.

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