PL ANT OF TH E M ON TH
JIM FUNAI, LIC Cuyahoga Community College
SHELLEY FUNAI, LIC Stan Hywet Hall and Gardens Junipers are a very popular woody plants because there is a form for almost every landscape use.
JUNIPERUS CHINENSIS ‘PFITZERIANA’ PFITZER JUNIPER
As we close out another great year of sharing our plant geekery with you, we want to do a throwback to a plant that hardly shows up in the market anymore. This plant once held reign over the landscape, especially through Western European gardens, which we borrow most of our American landscape aesthetic from. We are going back to a time when the nursery industry, still in infancy, was evolving beyond production of fruit trees and shrubs. In the late 1800s, the American nursery trade was about 75% fruit tree and 25% ornamental plants. The first ornamentals to be offered were mostly bare-root, deciduous plants that most of us hate these days because we have torn so many out. Forsythia, Mock Orange, and the shrub Honeysuckles are among the most abundant offerings we found in the nursery catalogs of the time. By 1900, the
28 | Official Publication of The Ohio Landscape Association
shift to ornamentals had made it to 50-50, and by the Great Depression things had flipped to 75% ornamental. The earliest record anyone has found of the Pfitzer Juniper in American nursery trade dates to 1901, which was likely offered first by Hick’s Nursery on Long Island. However, to find the origin of this garden centenarian, we need to travel back to Mongolia in the 1860s, when a Jesuit, Armund David, was collecting plants for the French Church. His records show