Every landscape designer has a list of plants they would never include in their plans and hate to see used in landscapes. They might just be a personal preference, but more likely these are plants that are incredibly common and overused. They also add an unsustainable factor to our landscapes. I'll get to that in a minute.
What tops my list? Green Giant Arborvitae. Grown by the millions, this tree is the worst. It's everywhere. It's the #1 tree suggested whenever anyone wants to screen a view. No questions asked, "plant Green Giants". In a straight line, of course. Unfortunately, that's not usually an appropriate choice. Or a creative one. In fact, in my opinion, it's downright lazy.
If you are tight on space, Green Giants will get far too big. If you live "in the country", an undulating natural mixed border is far more appropriate. Straight lines of monocultures are incredibly unnatural, and rarely blend with the style of your home or existing landscaping. I'll give you this, they do make a highly effective screen, grow quickly, and are a vast improvement on previous cultivars that fall apart under heavy snows. But I would probably only ever use them as PART of a mixed border that includes evergreen and deciduous plants. Keep in mind that they are a hybrid of Asian Arborvitaes that live for over 300 years, continuously growing all that time.
Moving on.
Here's the rest of my list of plants I feel are overused in our area:
Stella d'Oro Daylily - completely overused for decades
Japanese azalea - most of these are just so ugly and also prone to pests
Forsythia - especially horrid when pruned into a hedge, at least let them have their natural shape
Hydrangeas with blue flowers - so unnatural, please don't plant these in your naturalistic landscape
Knock-out Roses - now known to spread rose rosette disease
Golden mop thread leaf false cypress - I don't understand why people prune these and cut off the moppiness they purchased them for, totally unnecessary
Juniper - usually very overgrown, outsized for their spaced, and awful when pruned into a hedge (out of fashion)
Yew - also usually totally overgrown (out of fashion)
Plants go in and out of fashion over time including these last two - you can tell if a home has a monstrous yew or juniper hedge in front (or is terribly over pruned) that the landscape hasn't been updated in decades, and this leads one to believe that the interior of the home also hasn't been updated in decades either. If you're trying to sell your home, keep in mind that an outdated landscape, while tidy and kempt, will still feel old to your buyers.
Invasives - aside from being invasive, which automatically makes them a no-go for me, these plants have been terribly overused as well:
Miscanthus grass - especially zebra-type cultivars which always feel completely out of place in SC PA with their tropical vibes.
Barberry - finally banned for sale in PA except supposedly sterile cultivars (don't believe that)
Burning bush
Butterfly bush
Rose of sharon
Privet
Bradford pear (also banned for sale in PA)
Norway maple
So, why are these plants so overused by landscape installers? They're considered "indestructible," and that's how they sell these plants to their customers. That sounds really good, right? Plants guaranteed not to die? They can be planted at any time of year, in any type of soil, in almost any climate, are nearly completely pest and disease resistant, and can survive almost any weather condition without any additional watering from the homeowner. The installer can plant them, water them in, and walk away knowing they can survive at least up to the 1-year warranty. Awesome, yes? Mmmmm.... not so much, actually.
Pioneering plantsman J.C. Raulston concluded that in any given region of the United States, a traditional palette of only 40 shrubs and trees comprised more than 90 percent of landscape plantings. -- biography on JC Raulston Arboretum website JC Raulston Arboretum - J. C. Raulston Biography (ncsu.edu)
What wrong with that?
Aside from being incredibly boring and making the world a very homogonous place?
If all landscapers across the country are using just about the same set of plants, then everywhere you go all of the landscapes look exactly the same. You can go to a home in Massachusetts, Alabama, Kansas, or Oregon, and they're identical. You can't tell where you are in the world. There's no genius loci, no sense of place. And no native plants, either, by the way.
This has been what most people consider to be a "well landscaped" home for about 4 decades now. This house could be anywhere in the country. We can't tell. Without plants native to the area, no native vernacular included, there's no spirit of place. It's totally generic.
How do we create a sense of place? We study our local regional character - the plants specific to the area, the wildlife, think about whether we're in a meadow, a forest, a wetland. Consider if there's a creek, rock outcroppings, or other natural features and topography. We can even think about the local vernacular in historical buildings. But most of us live in typical residential neighborhoods where none of that exists anymore, it has all been stripped away. All we have to go on is they style of our home and a guess as to what used to be there. We can design our landscapes using as many native plants as possible and try to create something with a character that fits with the style of our home and also expresses our own personal style.
Now let's think back those straight rows of Green Giant Arborvitaes. What does that fit in with?
When a landscaper's default suggestion for screening is a straight line of Green Giants, to me this is not design of any kind. It's certainly not regional character. But even if you live on a small property in a residential neighborhood and need some basic screening.... let's come up with a comparison...
Let's say you need a retaining wall in your back yard. You'd expect it to be functional, of course. But you'd also want it to blend with the style of your home and landscaping, yes? If you paid a reputable landscape firm to design and install a retaining wall that fits in with the rest of your landscape and instead you ended up with a stick-straight wall built of plain concrete block, you'd be pretty unhappy, I think. Green Giants are the concrete block of softscapes.
These and those other "indestructible" plants may sound great -- low maintenance and all. But they are generic and serve no purpose other than to take up space and fit in with a now 40-year-old aesthetic. It's 2024. This type of landscaping is no longer acceptable. It's definitely not sustainable or even ethical to install. Our landscapes must do more. They must be environmentally responsible. They must be designed to be sustainable for the future and serve more than just human needs.
My next series of posts will focus on the future of landscaping - sustainability. So many traditional methods of landscaping will no longer be sustainable in the future. Planting exotic plants that cannot be used by wildlife. Watering and mowing vast lawns. Sending stormwater from your rooftop into the street. Replacing dyed mulch year after year. Poisoning our waterways with fertilizers and pesticides.
Our landscapes will look different. That's ok.
We need every single planting to perform better.
-- Claudia West
UPDATE! September 13, 2024
Since writing this post I have found an excellent example of Arborvitaes used correctly! I was on trip to Ohio over Labor Day weekend to help my daughter move. I came across this home that had a screen from the main road with a beautiful mixed screen that included Arborvitaes as one of the evergreen components. I was unable to get a photo at the time, but I was able to pull the following photo off of Google Streetview which was taken a few years ago:
You can see that there are multiple types of trees and shrubs planted amongst the older deciduous trees. Imagine the larger trees fully leafed out, everything a bit older and larger, and the addition of a few more smaller flowering trees planted within the lawn. It creates a great screen from the main road. Is it a solid green wall? No. Most screens don't need to be. But it is effective at blocking the view from within and without and will continue to fill in as the years go by. This is what an appropriate screen should be for this home, and for most homes, if the space allows.
Diversity. Diversity in plant type (trees/shrubs evergreen/deciduous) gives you more resilience and more ecological function. Always build in diversity.
You might agree that's it's much prettier than a solid green wall, as well.
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