Broadmoor Juniper

Sturdy, low-maintenance plants are essential in every garden, to cover larger spaces and avoid adding gardening work to your busy schedule. It is best to limit the space given to high-maintenance plants, but we also want our gardens to be beautiful. To reconcile that we should choose interesting and attractive plants that cover large areas are also easy to care for. For cover the soil in front of taller shrubs we need plants that stay low, but sometimes plants that are just a few inches tall don’t look right. It is for situations like that experienced gardeners use the Broadmoor Juniper. Easy to grow, tough and reliable, this handsome plant is just the right size to stand out, but without blocking the view.

The Broadmoor Juniper grows into a broad, spreading mound of foliage up to 2 feet high, and reaching 8 feet or more across in time. The sturdy stems grow out horizontally across the ground, and shorter, vertical branches grow upwards from them, giving height. The foliage is dense and soft, with short needles, and all year round it is an attractive soft gray-green color. Whatever you grow in your garden, this coloring blends perfectly. It looks great, for example, spilling across the ground beneath shrubs with glossy, rich green foliage. This plant is a male form, so it does not have the toxic berries found in other related juniper varieties.

The Broadmoor Juniper is very versatile, growing in the front of beds among other shrubs, or cascading down slopes. It covers banks, and it spills over walls. It softens the hard boundary between planted beds and hard surfaces like driveways and terraces. Use it on rough ground among rocks and boulders, or as part of the foundation planting around your house, below deep windows. Wherever you grow this plant it looks perfect, and it fits in any style of garden at all. It is a great choice in colder zones, all the way through zone 3, where the choices of plants become more limited. It also grows as far as zone 7, but in warmer zones other more heat resistant types of junipers should be chosen.

Full sun is the best location for the Broadmoor Juniper, but it will tolerate a couple of hours of shade each day. It should always be planted in well-drained soil, which is why slopes and banks are such good locations. For mass planting, allow 4 feet between plants, to create a solid cover in a few years. It will grow in any type of soil, including limestone soils, rocky gravels, sand, and heavy clays. It will not grow in wet soil, although it is less susceptible than most other varieties to the juniper blight (Phomopsis) that attacks junipers growing in wet ground. This plant is normally not bothered by pests or diseases, and deer and rabbits usually leave it alone. It grows in urban gardens, and this is one of the easiest plants for your garden, requiring no care to always look great. Allow plenty of room for it to spread, so that trimming is not needed. If you do need to trim it, cut back to a shoot on top of the main stem, so that the cut is hidden, allowing new growth to quickly develop. Do not cut back into bare branches, as these can never produce new shoots.

The Broadmoor Juniper is a selected variety of the savin juniper, Juniperus sabina. This plant grows wild in Spain, in central Europe, northern Turkey, and across into Central Asia and parts of Siberia. It always grows in mountains and places with poor soil. Wild plants are very variable and sometimes they are spreading, and other times more vertical, up to 15 feet tall. In 1933, D. Hill Nurseries, in Dundee, Illinois, obtained seed of this plant collected in the Ural Mountains, in Kazakhstan. They grew a batch of seedlings and distributed them to other nurseries around the world.

Some of those special seedlings were sent to the nursery of F.J. Grootendorst & Sons, in Boskoop, The Netherlands. They selected several interesting and unique forms from among these plants, including one they called ‘Broadmoor’. Plants were later brought to America, where this variety became a staple, especially for cold parts of the country. Although it has been around a long time, it is still a reliable and durable plant that has been a favorite with generations of gardeners. Our plants are grown from stem pieces, to preserve the exact genetics of that original plant, so they are identical in every way. The demand for easy ground cover is always strong, so order your plants now, while our limited stock remains available. You won’t regret choosing this reliable garden standard that has stood the test of time.