winter landscaping – Land Design Associates

Illuminate Your Holidays With Land Design Associates

Land Design Associates — Mon, 23 Oct 2023 15:41:48 +0000

‘Tis the season to spread warmth, joy, and cheer, and what better way to do that than by adorning your home or business with the enchanting glow of Christmas lights? At Land Design Associates, we’re excited to offer you an exceptional selection of Christmas lighting solutions that will transform your space into a winter wonderland.

Why Choose Land Design Associates for Your Christmas Lighting Needs?

Stunning Variety: Explore our extensive range of Christmas lights, from classic white to vibrant multicolor, and discover the perfect style to match your holiday aesthetic.

Professional Installation: Leave the ladder-climbing and tangled wires to us. Our experienced team will expertly install your lights, ensuring a safe and captivating display.

Energy Efficiency: Our LED lighting options are not only dazzling but also energy-efficient, helping you save on your electricity bills while reducing your environmental footprint.

Customized Designs: Let your imagination run wild! We can create customized lighting designs to suit your unique preferences and the architecture of your property.

Hassle-Free Maintenance: If a bulb goes out or you encounter any issues, our responsive maintenance team will be there to make quick repairs, so your display stays brilliant all season long.

Schedule Your Christmas Lighting Installation Today!

Don’t wait until the last minute to light up your holidays. Secure your spot in our installation schedule by reaching out to us today! Whether you’re looking to brighten up your home, office, or commercial space, Land Design Associates is your trusted partner for all your Christmas lighting needs.

Book a Free Consulation!

5 Ways to Protect Your Evergreen Trees and Bushes From Winter Damage

Land Design Associates — Fri, 03 Jan 2020 19:54:06 +0000

Photo Credit: © Marco Verch

How to Take Care of Your Evergreens for Landscaping

Protecting Plants for Winter

New England’s harsh winters can wreak havoc on your evergreen trees and shrubs if you’re not careful. Even though evergreens can survive through the winter months, cold temperatures, high winds and a winter sun can dry out evergreen foliage, damage bark and, if severe enough, even injure or kill branches and roots.

Protecting your evergreens during the winter can mitigate the damage and make for a prosperous spring. When you’re landscaping your yard and taking care of evergreens, you want your trees and shrubs to be an investment.

It takes a little time and planning in colder zones as in ours, so make sure that your fall maintenance schedule includes time for plant protection.

Here are five tips to protect your evergreens during the winter.

Apply Winter Mulch

During the winter, mulching landscape evergreen shrubs insulates the soil and roots.

Mulch maintains a steady soil temperature to prevent temperature extremes because it acts as an insulating blanket. Bare ground in winter causes temperature fluctuations that can force plants out of the ground exposing the roots. A warm spell can also do more damage by forcing plants out of dormancy triggering new growth that will ten be damaged as soon as temperatures plummet again.

Check susceptible plants after the first hard frost in fall to apply winter mulch. Applying too early, before the plant is dormant, may damage the plant.

Spray Anti-Desiccants

Anti-desiccants, also known as anti-transpirants, are landscaping sprays that supply protective coatings to evergreens during the winter months. Spray an anti-desiccant product to reduce moisture loss on evergreens.

When the ground freezes, plants are unable to absorb moisture so they take moisture from their foliage, causing it to dry out. This can damage or kill your beloved rhododendrons, andromeda, hollies and more.

When sprayed on the evergreen foliage, anti-desiccants hold in the moisture during winter. They provide a protective coating on the foliage to reduce the water that escapes.

An application in November and again in January should protect them for the entire season.

Water Your Landscape Evergreens

It might sound counterintuitive, but watering your evergreens during winter in between snowfalls will provide them with needed moisture to prevent desiccation and add insulating protection.

This is especially true during those sunny winter days that we’re sometimes accustomed to in New England thanks to our dry winters. Evergreens, after all, die not because of freezing but because of a lack of humidity.

As for leaving the work to snow? Snow insulates plants and regulates ground temperature. Don’t be afraid to shovel some extra snow on your shrubs but take care not to break them!

Wrap Your Shrubs

Wrapping shrubs creates a wind barrier and traps some warmth.

Use a porous material, such as burlap or sheets. There are many benefits to wrapping prized evergreens, including protection from deer damage, salt damage, ice damage and sun damage.

Tie up your shrubs that have a tendency to split from the weight of snow with twine. Evergreens such as arborvitaes sometime split down the middle and this damage is irreversible. Deciduous plants will typically recover, but some evergreens will not regrow from the damaged area.

Wrap Your Trees

Wrapping your landscape trees also offers some great winter protection in order to protect bark from sunscald.

Sunscald is a condition whereby tree bark on deciduous trees is damaged and frozen following periods of high temperatures during the winter season. On cold winter days, the sun heats the bark to stimulate growth. When a cloud or other obstacle suddenly blocks the sun, the temperature quickly drops, killing the active tissue.

Signs of sunscald include deep fissures, cracking dead bark and sunken areas. You can protect your trees by wrapping them with a commercial tree wrap designed for this use. Use white or another light color, never black or brown as they will absorb too much heat.

Thinking About a Yard Upgrade?

If you want to maintain your landscape properly for the winter and get a head start on spring landscape planning, chat with us. We’ve been helping families in south Boston create and maintain beautiful landscapes for over 25 years, so we know a thing or two.

The 9 Most Interesting Evergreens to Plant in Massachusetts

Land Design Associates — Thu, 20 Dec 2018 21:19:51 +0000

Go beyond the mundane and try something new for an interesting backdrop or a focal point for your yard all year long. Interesting evergreens are readily available at garden centers—so be daring and plant one into an existing bed or border! Make sure to consider growth rate, though, as some take years to grow 6 inches and others will grow 2 feet per year. Slower, dwarf varieties work well in a small space or closer to the house where they can be seen.

Color

Evergreens come in more colors than just green. Some striking varieties come in colors of gold, lime green, silver or a combination.

1. ‘Forever Goldy’ Arborvitae – Narrow growing stays golden all year round but with a more bronzy hue in winter. Plant it in front of a green backdrop to enjoy its dramatic color. Mix it into plantings with silver or burgundy hues. It looks great in winter containers as a young plant, too. ‘Forever Goldy’ has a columnar shape that mixes easily into small spaces. Give it a sunny location for the best growth.

2. Korean Fir ‘Horstmann’s Silberlocke’ – A beautiful needled tree best seen up close. It is slow growing with needles that flex inwards revealing its silvery undersides. Its needles are soft, retaining the silver color all winter. Eye-catching, upright purple cones are produced on the branches. A pyramidal tree, it grows 10 feet tall and 6 feet wide in 10 years.

3. ‘Daub’s Frosted’ Juniper – A low spreading juniper is particularly unique among other creeping juniper. New growth is lime green above the bluish green interior foliage. Works well as a groundcover or on a difficult and sunny spot. It is more unique than most junipers on the market. The mature size is 8 feet wide by 2 feet high.

Photo: Korean Fir

Photo: Korean Fir Cones

Photo: Juniper Daubs

Texture

4. Dragon’s Eye Japanese Red Pine – Small specimen pine with butter yellow banding on the long needles. When you look down onto the tip of a branch, it looks like an eye, hence its name. It has a very soft, fine texture and is slow growing,10 feet after 10 years of growth. The bark is scaly and fissured with colors in gray to rusty orange. It can look a bit floppy when its young, but give it time and it will be a graceful garden favorite.

5. Weeping Sargent’s Hemlock – Softly textured, weeping form of our native hemlocks it is a graceful, arching accent tree that grows in full sun to shade. Branches are broad and spread up to 5 feet tall by 8-10 feet wide. Don’t hide it behind bigger plants as it contributes a graceful element that needs to be seen.

6. Umbrella Pine – Pyramidal shape, needled evergreen, needles arranged in whorls like an umbrella, glossy needles 2 – 5 inches long, long-lived, slow-growing maybe 6 inches per year, is a “living fossil” as it has no known close relatives it’s history can be traced back to the Triassic period. Found in cool mountainous regions in central Japan.

Photo: Umbrella Pine

Size/Shape

Rounded, thin, arching and weeping…evergreens grow in so many shapes.

7. Dragon Lady Holly – Has a forbidding name but this super glossy evergreen grows into a lean, tall pyramid 15 feet high and 6 feet wide. Vibrant red berries accent deep bluish green foliage. It retains its elegant shape without pruning but will allow it if you want to keep it perfectly symmetrical. Dragon Lady holly is a lovely specimen holly suited to foundation plantings and borders.

8. Mr. Bowling Ball – Arborvitae is not what you would ordinarily think of as an arborvitae. Mr. Bowling Ball is dwarf, softly textured and never needs pruning. At 3 feet tall and wide its rounded form is suitable for foundations, along walkways, containers and more. Bright green, lacy foliage is retained all year.

9. Russian Cypress has low growing, arching branches with a feathery texture similar to arborvitae. It spreads 8 feet wide and only 1 foot tall so it makes a nice groundcover. Russian cypress is an effortless alternative to creeping juniper. It tolerates full sun and shade, moist soil. Give it room to grow without requiring pruning to appreciate the soft arching fronds.

Photo: Russian Cypress

Call the experts at Land Design Associates to help you select and install wonderful plants for your garden. Contact us or call 781-769-3286 to set up a no cost consultation.

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How To Dress Your Home For The Holidays: Colorful Winter Landscaping

Land Design Associates — Tue, 11 Dec 2018 20:07:05 +0000

After the leaves fall, the flowers are long gone and cold settles in, your yard can look incredibly bleak; however, that doesn’t mean you have to settle for a monochromatic blanket of white…

While shopping for the bright and bold flowers for the spring and summer is fun, planning ahead for winter interest and color also offers its own rewards. To get some nice color in the winter, plant these trees and shrubs where you can easily view them from inside your house. There are a few other ways to add that much-needed pop of color in the bleak winter months.

1. Interesting Tree Bark

Plants with interesting bark are stars without their foliage and really shine in the winter. These trees and shrubs are beautiful in summer and winter when the bark is normally overlooked. Stems and trunks with peeling bark resemble cinnamon, such as the Paperbark Maple and climbing hydrangea.

Paperback Maple

Try a Stewartia with a camouflaged appearance. Stewartia is a small tree that flowers mid-summer. Both of these trees work well in smaller garden or closer to the home where you can view them up close.

Stewertia

2. Colorful Branches

Coral Bark Maple is a small tree with brilliant bark on its young branches. As the foliage drops in autumn, the tree’s bark begins to turn an attractive coral-pink which intensifies in cold weather. The winter bark color is deeper the more sun it receives.

Coral Maple Bark

Although fairly boring in the summer, red twig dogwoods add cheery colors in yellow, orange and fiery reds in winter. The branch color persists all season long and is dramatic when planted in masses. They require cutting back every few years as newer branches have the boldest color. ‘Mid-Winter Fire’ and ‘Arctic Fire’ are good choices.

Red Twig Dogwoods

3. Bright Berries

Beautyberry is a native shrub found in the southeast that grows 3-5 foot tall and wide with arching stems. Its foliage is not spectacular and is hardly worth looking at. As the foliage turns in fall and the leaves drop, the stems are concealed by bunches of small bright berries. The large amount of bright purple berries is striking during a time when there isn’t anything else found this color during winter.

Beautyberry

Winterberry provides a winter show of abundant bright red berries covering the stems that can persist into spring. It’s a large, native shrub found in wetland areas along the east coast. Once the leaves have dropped, you are left with an astonishing view of thousands of berries adorning every stem. The cut stems are a bright addition to holiday cut greens. The berries are usually red but yellow varieties may be also be found. (‘Berry Heavy Gold’) This is an easy plant to grow and has few problems but keep in mind that it suckers and will grow very large. One male winterberry (‘Jim Dandy’) is required to pollinate female shrubs for heavier fruiting.

Winterberry

Checkerberry is an evergreen groundcover that is native to eastern North America. Leaves are glossy, rounded and leathery and the plant grows 3-6 inches high. Plants will spread over time to form a groundcover. White flowers appear early summer and change into edible bright red berries. Leaves and berries have the aroma and taste of wintergreen. This plant grows well in shade with medium water requirements.‘Berry Heavy’® Heavier berry set than the species Try ‘Red Sprite’ for a more compact variety that grows to only 2-3 feet.

Checkerberry

4. Plant late winter/early spring bloomers

Kick winter gloom with early bloomers. Witch Hazel, also native, blooms February/March with yellow to copper blooms and is one of the first plants to flower in New England. Give it some space as it will can become more than 12 feet wide.

Witch Hazel

Lenten Rose has semi-evergreen foliage and blooms in February-April. The flowers pop up before new foliage and remain for several weeks. The foliage will look tired by spring, so freshen it up by cutting it back.

Not to be overlooked, crocus planted in a warm sunny spot are reliably one of the first harbingers of spring.

No matter what you’re looking for in a landscape for your home, the experts at Land Design Associates can help. Contact us today to learn more or give us a call at 781-769-3286.