Planting a Fast-Growing, Narrow Evergreen Hedge of Full Speed a Hedge ‘American Pillar’ Arborvitaes

Good morning, friends. I hope you're having a wonderful day. While I'm really excited to get to work on today's project, we're going to be fixing the emerald green arborvitae hedge. Now, some of you might remember that last year we put in this beautiful hedge of emerald green arborvitaes, but when construction on the library took place, we had to remove almost all the hummingbird trellises and the hedge four times for construction vehicles to get in. So needless to say, the hedge is looking a little bit rough. So let me show you what it looks like, and my plan is to put a new hedge on the interior because we've only lost about 50% of the trees. So that seems like a better investment to put a hedge on the inside. And you know, I was having a hard time deciding whether I wanted to just replace the units with new units or whether I wanted to put in new smaller trees on the interior. But thankfully, just a month and a half ago, new electrical lines were dug. And because of that, everybody in the area came and marked where all their lines were. And wouldn't you know that all of the lines are buried under that emerald green arborvitae hedge. So really, at any point in our lives, all of those companies, Verizon, Comcast, Xfinity, water lines, power lines, they could come in and dig them up. So that's the other reason why I decided to go with this new hedge on the interior. But enough talk, let's get to work and start on this new hedge that I feel like is going to be our forever hedge. So here's basically what we're left with. And this is actually better than what it looked like two days ago. If you see this tree right here and that tree right there, those are full speed of hedge thin man arborvitaes that I had left over from another project. So what I've done on the exterior is I popped in a thin man every three feet from an emerald green. So here's one of the emerald greens that survived. And then you can see we lost a whole unit there, a whole unit there popped in a thin man. So these are all the emerald greens that survived. I did stick in some emerald green arborvitaes in what might look like weird spots. But these are strategically spaced so that when we're sitting in the living room, we actually get a block from people that park their cars along the property. And the main place where we had all the construction vehicles enter was over here. And I can see we even have a dead one right there I need to cut out. So that's a new tree that I put in right there. But you can see some sections are okay. And some aren't. And we're back to the point where we can see people's cars. We can see all the houses here in the cul-de-sac yet again. So I decided to go with these. These are the Full Speed Ahead American Pillar Arborvitaes because they grow very, very quickly. They grow just as fast as a green giant apparently, up to two feet a year once established. And they also get much taller. These can get 20 to even 30 feet tall. But they're only going to get three to five feet wide. So I'm hoping at 20 to 30 feet tall, that actually will block out the second story. So I'm spacing these trees three feet apart. So I ordered 29 trees from Great Garden Plants. And I ordered from them specifically because they have an excellent way of shipping their plants. I've ordered from them many times. The quality is always really good and the packaging is always really good. So once I get all these planted, I want to measure the above-ground height of the American Pillar Arborvitaes, the Thin Man Arborvitaes, and the Emerald Green Arborvitaes that made it. And then we can track their growth over the course of many years and see which one is really the best investment. And you can see from this angle, it actually doesn't look that bad once you hit about right there. I'm so excited to watch these trees grow and fill in. And even though we had a little bit of a setback in terms of the original hedge that we put in, I think this is actually going to be a more helpful hedge because now we can track the three different types of plants. So the American Pillar above ground currently on October, I think today's October 9th, is 32 inches tall. The Thin Man is 48 inches tall and those are a year old. And then the Emerald Greens that survived are 58 inches tall. So let's try and revisit this area every single year and see how much growth they put on and when they start to really catch up with each other. So it's currently 2024. I'm going to guess by 2027 that we might be at the top of the Hummingbird Trellises. So I did go ahead and extend this bed. These logs that we had around the property, they are marking the electric line that goes into the library. And I also moved some large shrubs over here. So we have the Brandywine by Burnham over here. Proven Winner sent this out a few weeks ago and this is the El Nino Desert Orchid and some of you told me to plant one of those. So that's going to get huge. I believe that Desert Orchid gets 10 to 15 feet wide so that's going to fill in that entire area and we'll be able to carry over some of the plants that I already have in Grace's garden like this Lemon Jade Sedum and the Autumn Joy Sedum. I'm just going to kind of take the plants that I already have, divide them and use them to fill in this new section. But I do want to put in some more large shrubs that are deciduous that have really nice fragrance. So we have the El Nino Desert Orchid. We also have, if I back up here, I moved this Aphrodite Sweet Shrub that I have over to this location. I think I want to put a Korean Spice by Burnham right here. You know it's really hard to lose that many trees. It's confusing, frustrating, even embarrassing. But sometimes things just happen in the garden and I think we have to forgive ourselves, learn from them and move on. And I definitely learned a lot by losing all of these trees. Well friends, thank you so much for spending some time out here in the garden with me and I will see you sometime really soon because we are going to Chanticleer and then I'm going to be doing an October garden tour because our next succession of cut flowers is starting to bloom. I'll see you sometime soon. Bye!