Old favorites

You could recreate the front yard plantings in my neighborhood with a palette of fewer than ten shrubs. 

Big yews are common in local yards

For foundation plantings, there are the yews, the pieris and mountain laurels, and those gigantic Catawba rhododendrons. Then perhaps there’s a forsythia, a juniper, a burning bush, a barberry, or a spirea in a sunny patch closer to the street.

A nearby rhododendron ready to flower next spring

    How did we bond with these old favorites?  I ran across a strenuous bit of scholarship that helps answer this question. Denise Wiles Adams, a garden historian, spent almost 10 years reading through American nursery catalogs published from 1719 to 1940 to tally the plants offered and how widely they were sold. She presents some of her results in Restoring American Gardens, An Encyclopedia of Heirloom Ornamental Plants 1640-1940. 

    From her book I learned that those Catawba rhododendrons that are so prevalent in my neighborhood have been around the Boston area since at least 1841. Rhododendron catawbiense is a native of the southeastern US that grows to the size of a truck in the right shady conditions. 

Catawba rhododendron, dense and reliably evergreen, flowering in late spring

Michael Dirr, in his invaluable Manual of Woody Landscape Plants, describes it this way: “Very handsome and aesthetic broadleaf evergreen; the flowers are beautiful but the foliage is equally valuable; beautiful when used in mass; hardy to about -20ºF with proper cultivar selection.” 

     Evidently a whole lot of nurseries, garden centers, and consumers agree, because there’s hardly a yard in my neighborhood that doesn’t contain at least one of these shrubs. 

This one was growing in our yard when we arrived

I still remember seeing these rhododendrons in the wild in Great Smoky Mountains National Park 40 years ago. It was like seeing lions on their home savannah.

    Forsythia is another landscape cliché in my region. The one we see is Forsythia x intermedia, a hybrid between two Asian species. 

At the corner of our lot. With more sun it would make more flowers.

Adams reports that one of its parents. Forsythia viridissima or golden bell, was introduced to the US in 1844. The genus was named after William Forsyth, a royal head gardener and a founder of Britain’s Royal Horticultural Society. 

     A less than prescient 1870 authority commented, “Its luxuriance, the earliness of it bright small yellow flowers, and the fact that it is a comparatively new thing, has given this shrub a reputation that it may not sustain.” The hybrid got here around 1880 after it was discovered in a German botanic garden. Can you drive a block in April without passing a glowing yellow forsythia bush?

Correctly pruned. Shearing forsythia is criminal--photo 4028mdk09

    Adams points out that we generally buy what’s readily available at garden centers—or now, at big box stores. That means that our choices are partly determined by what’s easy to propagate and grow on a large scale. Both forsythia and Catawba rhododendrons fit the bill.

To get to market, most trees and shrubs have to be easy to produce

    Adams observes that plant fashions come in cycles. When we think we’re planting something daring and original, we’re probably just rediscovering a plant that’s been out of vogue. Catawba rhododendrons and forsythia haven’t had a chance to disappear, though, because they pretty much live forever. Boring clichés or beautiful classics? You decide.