Home » Plants & Animals » Gardening in Southern U.S. » Revenge of the Red-Tips

Revenge of the Red-Tips

© Emily Levitt

First time homeowners have often run out of 'fun money' by the time they decide to spiff up their landscaping. I know; this is what happened to me when I built my first house---and I am still living in it. Some of my bargain landscape plants are still here as well. And they are trying to take over.

The common red-tipped photinias which line part of the driveway were intended to become a small hedge when I put them in back in 1980. They were five gallon plants, way back then. Cheap and easy to grow. The information on photinias declares that they make small hedges, and MAY become small trees. Indeed. But small? Perhaps if you have a very loose definition for what qualifies as 'small'.

These suckers are now sixty feet high! That's what I get for taking such good care of them. Red tips are now the size of level three trees (that's forty to sixty feet in height) all around Atlanta. Virtually all of them were planted to create screening hedges, or to delineate commercial properties as border shrubs. These are the survivors of a blight which hit the metro area twenty years ago, and the healthy leftover plants have grown with a vengance.

The early part of the nineties saw many red-tips in North Georgia fall to the wayside, victims of a widespead black spot disease, which felled them by the dozens. I didn't want to lose mine, since they were finally doing a nice job of blocking the view of my neighbors' pool.

(I also had a great view of the Barcalounger in their den, because our home is situated on a higher elevation than theirs, and the garage of our house is directly across from the back of their house. I could see over their fence into their television room, whether I wanted to or not).

The photinias were, at last, about fiften feet high. It would take pricey plants to replace them with anything of equivalent size, so I treated them regularly with fungicides, and they stayed healthy. After the blight passed, I just let them alone. Oh, I pruned them up a little from time to time, to keep them from whacking me in the face as I passed by, but that was about it.

They continued to thrive, and somehow over the last few years they've reached a tremendous size. And I really didn't notice! What can I offer as an excuse? I guess I've been so busy mangaing the heavily rationed water needs of my flashy specimens that I ignored the red tips.

The copyright of the article Revenge of the Red-Tips in Gardening in Southern U.S. is owned by Emily Levitt. Permission to republish Revenge of the Red-Tips in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.