Lime Glow Juniper

One of the most fashionable and desirable colors in the garden is chartreuse-green. This vibrant yellow shade of green stands out in any bed, while harmonizing with all the other colors of your garden. It is especially desirable in conifer evergreens, where silver-blue is the most common variation around. When this knock-out color is found on a tough, reliable plant that takes drought, heat and chilling cold too, we have a winner. Making a graceful low mound of feathery branches, the Lime Glow™ Juniper is the perfect addition to your garden. It brings chartreuse tones all summer, and colors multiple shades of gold, copper, orange and purple in winter. This plant looks great every day of the year.

The Lime Glow Juniper is a compact mound of neat branches, spreading outwards rather than upwards, and developing into a bush that is 6 to 12 inches tall and 2 to 3 feet wide. The many branches grow at about 30 degrees to the ground, and they are feathery, with shorter side branches rising more vertically. The tiny leaves clasp the stems tightly, far softer to the touch than the sharp needles found on many other evergreens. In spring the foliage color is vibrant lime-green, holding that tone throughout the summer. With the colder weather of fall the leaves turn golden, and in colder zones they darken as the temperatures drop, becoming coppery-bronze, flushed with orange, and with deeper purple tones towards the tips of the branches by mid-winter.

The Lime Glow Juniper makes a wonderful color contrast with dark greens and with silver and blue foliage, and its low size makes it perfect for the front of beds. It looks great softening the edges of hard surfaces, like paths, driveways and patios, and it looks just as good among rocks and boulders, which reflect its natural home. Its compact size means you won’t be having to trim it and it stays low quite naturally – no work required. It’s a good choice for sloping ground too, with the dense roots and branches preventing soil erosion and blocking weed growth. Use a single plant or a small group as an accent, or plant a larger group, spacing them 2 feet apart, to fill larger areas of your garden with low-maintenance interest all year round. In a new garden its ideal for completing the foreground of your beds, and in older gardens there are always empty spots that need a splash of color – now you have the ideal plant for all those needs.

Full sun is the best location for the Lime Glow Juniper. Chartreuse and golden foliage on conifers is notorious for scorching in the sun when grown in hot zones, but this variety is highly regarded because it doesn’t do that – so even in zones 8 and 9 it will look great right out in the open. This tough plant is just as reliable in cold zones, and it is completely hardy right through zone 3. Wherever you live, this is a plant you can grow. When it comes to soil, just avoid damp, but otherwise anything goes. Rocky, sandy, gravel or clay – it doesn’t matter to this juniper, which is naturally adapted to harsh environments and poor soil. Every garden has ‘desert spots’, where nothing seems to grow. If that sounds like you, then this plant is your answer. After a short period to become established it is very drought resistant, and an unstoppable addition to your garden. It needs no trimming – the natural form is best – and no significant care is needed at all. Pests and diseases are almost never problems, and deer leave it alone too. If you do need to reduce its width, cut back the outermost branches to just in front of a stem on the top, so that the cut is hidden and you keep the natural look of the plant.

There are many junipers growing all around the northern parts of the world, and the creeping Juniper, Juniperus horizontalis, can be found in rocky, dry and sandy places right across the top of North America, all the way from Newfoundland to British Columbia, and around the Great Lakes. This tough plant survives where little else will, and it does the same in our gardens. An adaptable and variable plant, it has many garden forms. Like other evergreens there are two kinds of needles on this plant. Young seedlings have spiny leaves, and the branches grow flat across the ground. Many garden varieties show the same effect and spread widely. Mature wild plants develop adult foliage, which is scale-like, and grips the branches tightly. In the creeping juniper those plants have more upright, feathery foliage and a more compact habit. A well-known older variety of that type is the blue-green Andorra Juniper (‘Plumosa’), and it in turn gave rise to a similar variety called ‘Youngstown’, found in a nursery in Nebraska. In 1984 the garden expert Laurence Hatch found a unique, lime-green branch growing on a plant of ‘Youngstown’, at the J.C. Raulston Arboretum. Raleigh, North Carolina. He named it ‘Noslg’, and it was released by the Arboretum with the trademarked name of Lime Glow. This wonderful plant is ideal for bringing brightness and interest to your garden without bringing work, and this fashionable color always sells fast. Order now, while our plants remain available, because they will be gone very soon.