Friday, November 8, 2024

I am thinking about buying the winterberry

 

Of course there are a lot of factors to consider. For starters, you'd need to make room. You'd need to relocate the blueberries, which you've already planted in the bed where you envision the winterberry taking root. Where would they go? It's possible they'd survive on the hillside in the backyard, though you don't have a hose hooked up back there. Be honest: Would you really water them? Then again, given their propensity for dry soils, would you need to? You were excited about the blueberries when you planted them, and now you're feeling excited, albeit more so, about the winterberry. Before we dismiss this as a case of greener pastures, however, let's consider that you are refining your preferences every day. It's possible the vision you have for your garden these days is different than the vision you once had. You have evolved and you have a keener eye for garden design now than you did then. There's validity to your instinct: The verticality and the parallelism of the winterberry might in fact align better with the bed's shape and location as well as the azalea in the middle of it. The blueberries are useful, and tasty surely, but perhaps a bit squat. It's possible they might not grow large enough to provide everything you need or were looking for when you decided to bring new shrubs into your life. Of course, it's difficult to determine, when weighing the pros and cons of blueberries versus winterberries, whether or not the bush that's already growing in your homestead is superior to the shrub that has enticed you but has not yet proven itself a viable partner to your garden's soil, location, and goals.