Tree of the Week: Green Giant Arborvitaes

We’re trying to do a tree or a shrub of the week each week at the nursery. I know we’ve covered Weigela, Redbuds and some of these other things. This week’s tree of the week is the Green Giant arborvitae. 

It’s our most popular evergreen because one, it grows fast, two, it’s deer resistant, and three, it’s winter wind resistant and it doesn’t get as big as a spruce tree would. It creates a really nice screen and it does so fairly quickly.

I love the smell of them. It has that cedar-y kind of smell to it. The green giant will get 35 to 40 feet tall and about 10 to 12 feet wide. Now we deal with some customers who say ‘oh, that’s too big, I don’t have that much space.’ You know, if you’re on a smaller lot, 10 to 12 feet could eat up a significant amount of your backyard.

They make a dwarf variety called Northern Spire and we carry that at the nursery as well. Now that one only gets 15 to 20 feet tall and only 5 feet wide, so it’s about half the size of the original green giant. There are many many different varieties of Arborvitae. There are globe ones that grow low to the ground, but then the upright ones, there’s a ton there as well. 

Emerald Green gets about 15 feet tall, about 3 to 4 foot wide, it is probably the most common plant we sell, but the Green Giant is really starting to catch up to it. The deer do tend to eat the Emerald Green.

There’s some really cool gold options as well. There’s one called Janed Gold, another one called Forever Goldie, another one called Yellow Ribbon, and we have all these yellow arborvitae at the nursery as well. It’s a great way to brighten up an area if everything else is green and you want to mix it up a little bit. Those yellow arborvitae really pop out of the landscape.

There’s always new ones coming out. Like this year, we got a brand new one called Sting, it’s the first of its kind. It gets 12 to 20 feet tall, but only 18 inches wide. So if you’re looking for something really tall and somebody would say why would you want a plant that grows in that habit? 

Say you have a fireplace and the flowerbeds aren’t really wide by that fireplace and you want to soften that chimney up. This is a great plant that’s gonna get tall, but not get really wide. It won’t overgrow the bed, and it’ll soften that brick chimney up on the back side of the house.

There’s another brand new one that came out last year or the year before called Emerald Petite. Emerald Petite is really tiny, it only gets five to six feet tall and one to two feet wide.

They’re coming out with a lot of smaller shrubs because there used to be a lot of people saying ‘oh I don’t want to put this here, I don’t want to be trimming all the time and stuff,’ and it does come down to the right plant in the right spot. But they’re coming up with so many more options that you can have something underneath your bay window or even with the perennials.

Questions? Email us at [email protected] or call one of our two locations: Portage (330-499-0101) or Everhard (330-492-1243).