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Why conifers aren’t just for Christmas
We festoon them with decorations, but we should move on from the leylandii nightmare and enjoy these trees all year, says Sharon Smith
If it were not for its usefulness as a glittering seasonal accessory once a year, the conifer would be hard put to make many people’s Christmas lists. “If you asked the average person for their earliest memory of a conifer it would be of a great, big louring thing,” says Monique Gudgeon, owner, with her sculptor husband Simon, of Sculpture by the Lakes garden in Dorchester, Dorset. The garden is an International Conifer Conservation Programme (ICCP) “safe site” for rare and endangered conifers.
The apparent public aversion to conifers can be attributed in large part to the leylandii (Cuprocyparis leylandii), according to Matthew Pottage, curator at RHS Garden Wisley in Surrey. Leylandii’s rapid growth rate of 1m a year up to a height of 30m and a width of 8m has fuelled many a gardener’s worst nightmare.
“A big part of the problem is the misuse of leylandii: they were massive as a hedging plant in the 1980s and 1990s and they have incredible vigour,” says Pottage. “It was very much marketed as the best garden hedging plant, the best thing to screen you from your neighbours, but when left to its own devices it can reach 100ft high. It got planted and misused everywhere. So you’ve got that bubbling away, people knowing it’s a conifer and a big, green lump.”
Leylandii is not the only culprit, however. “The other thing that has scarred people was the trend for dwarf conifers, again in the 1980s and early 1990s,” says Pottage. “The trend for dwarf conifers, heathers, rock gardens – low-maintenance gardening – was another problem of wrong labelling. People being sold something they thought was slow growing or dwarf, but when planted grew very quickly and became enormous.”
Far from being uniformly dull, solid-green hulking lumps, conifers are a diverse group that includes cedars, firs, cypresses, junipers, kauri, larches, pines, hemlocks, redwoods, spruces and yews. They date back to when dinosaurs walked the earth and account for 40 per cent of the world’s forest cover.
Nor are all conifers evergreen and needle-bearing. For example, European larch (Larix decidua) is deciduous and turns gold in the autumn; Ginkgo biloba is both deciduous and broad leafed. There is a conifer for every garden, small or big, shady or sunny, wet or dry, and they offer a range of colour, shape and form.
“There’s one at Wisley that always attracts attention, a weeping form of a blue Atlas cedar called Cedrus atlantica ‘Glauca Pendula’”, says Pottage. “It’s an amazing thing, it looks like frozen icicles and it’s very slow-growing so it’s not going to take over your garden in half an hour. There’s also a pencil cypress called Cupressus sempervirens ‘Swanes Gold’, which is quite slow growing and makes a beautiful, narrow column and is good for a
‘They date back to when dinosaurs walked the earth and account for 40 per cent of the world’s forest’
small space. You can plant it and forget about it, it doesn’t need any real maintenance.
“Another one is Chamaecyparis lawsoniana ‘Wissel’s Saguaro’,” he adds. “Up close, the foliage looks like cockles. It doesn’t even look like a regular conifer. It’s an unusual shape and in the spring it has pollen cones like tiny pink buds, so it looks like it’s flowering. If you’ve been put off in a past life by a dwarf conifer or a leylandii hedge that got too big, look at the growth speed of a conifer because they’re not all monsters that are going to race upwards.”
Raising public awareness of the benefits of conifers is important for another reason, says Dr Hannah Wilson, head of ICCP at Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE). A third of the world’s estimated 615 conifer species are under threat of extinction from habitat destruction through deforestation, development, fires and pests – the latter two exacerbated by climate change.
“In terms of keeping the Earth healthy, capturing carbon and being the lungs of the planet, conifers are a huge proportion of the vegetation on the planet,” she says. “They’re also a key crop for forestry and building; pretty much in any room you’ll be able to find something made from conifers. Some anti-cancer drugs have a compound found in the yew tree and it might be that that plant has 10 or 20 sister species and perhaps one produces an even more useful compound. It’s important to preserve that potential.”
Safe sites, such as the Gudgeons’ garden, are part of ICCP’s conservation work. The 280 British sites are mostly privately-owned gardens containing rare and endangered species grown at RBGE from seed collected in the wild. Most sites are located in Britain because they are easier for ICCP to monitor and also because “people in Britain enjoy gardening and engaging with nature, so there’s that interest in getting involved,” notes Wilson.
The average number of conifers planted in a safe site is about 100; hence gardens tend to be larger, though there are some smaller sites with five or so plants. Owners need to have reasonably good horticultural knowledge and, ideally, to be able to nurture the collection over a period of about 30 years.
Before Monique Gudgeon moved to Dorchester in 2011, her attitude towards conifers was shaped by childhood memories of “big, old, dark yew trees in graveyards”. She changed her mind after a horticultural course made her realise there was more to them than graveyards and she learned of their plight from RBGE.
“I suddenly realised that trees I had taken for granted and thought, ‘oh they’re just big, old conifers, I don’t have to worry about them’, are in fact endangered,” she says. Gudgeon has 35 species of conifers including the Japanese spruce Picea koyamae, and the stinking cedar Torreya taxifolia, at Sculpture by the Lake – both are critically endangered.
“Safe sites are like libraries, holding stock in case it’s needed,” says Gudgeon. “Also, we’re educating people, saying, don’t just think of conifers as leylandii or yews or whatever. Actually, they’re incredibly important, beautiful trees.”