Evergreenss Light Up the Dark Season

When we built our house on a bare slope that had been a tobacco patch, I was eager to get some landscaping around it. Having little money and not much gardening experience, my first thought was to get some shrubs that would bloom.

Several friends and neighbors gave me offshoots from their own forsythia, mock orange, lilacs, and shrub roses and I scattered them about with a lavish hand.  

But come late Fall and Winter, my landscaping shrubs were mostly collections of gray-brown sticks -- not especially inspiring sticks. 

It wasn't till we'd been here almost fifteen years that I had access to plants at wholesale prices and, at the same time, discovered the wonderful varieties of evergreens available

I went a little wild.

But those evergreens -- all of which have  grown taller than I thought they would and need a lot of pruning -- are still a source of delight at this time of year, lighting up the front of the house with green and gold and silver.

Soon I'll begin cutting branches from them to decorate the house for Christmas . And I'll fill empty pots in our entryway with greenery -- to pull the eye from all those bare shrubs that are resting up for their big moment in the Spring.