not so light and fluffy...

Having greenery in a winter landscape is refreshing, especially when winter starts to get dreary. After the last couple snows, I appreciated it even more: I had never realized that evergreens were sticking their necks out by keeping their leaves all year round.

I used to see pines like this one with only a muffin top of foliage and wonder why all the lower branches were broken off.

During the last snow a friend explained to me that snow loads snap branches, especially when the snow is wet.

He pointed out this pine skirted with broken branches.

Close by there was another with damage.

It had only been snowing for a few hours.

Snow can help prune dead branches from a tree, but it can also take huge healthy limbs.

The new losses made the old ones more obvious. To prevent disease, broken branches will be cut back to the branch collar.

Although the pines seemed to be the most affected, no evergreen species in the cemetery was immune. There was damage to arborvitae, pine, spruce, holly... Here's a blue atlas cedar with a snapped limb. There was even a tree that was entirely uprooted by the big snow we had.

Sometimes snow weight will simply bend braches without causing any breakage. It can also splay the more shrub-like evergreens. When the snow melts, some branches will spring back to their former position. (Thanks for the photo, Art.) As another wet snow falls today, I'm thinking of my favorite evergreens in the cemetery. There are some ways to prevent damage, but with the number of big trees in Green-Wood, there's nothing to do but let nature have its way.

Arborvitae

The flattened sprays of scale-like leaves make Thuja occidentalis easily recognizable. These immature cones will open up and brown as they ripen.

Arborvitae (meaning "tree of life") gets its common name from the medicinal properties of the bark and twigs. It's also called Northern white cedar.

This arborvitae has outgrown (or has been trained out of) the typically conical shape.

Heavy winds or loose soil might have caused this specimen to fall over.

Now each branch is like a mini-tree. Or, as a friends says, it's a single-tree forest of arborvitae.

Bud Sporting in Alberta Spruce

The tree on the right is a dwarf Alberta spruce. It's a popular landscape planting because it grows slowly and retains its conical shape without any pruning. The tree on the left is also a dwarf Alberta spruce, but it's sporting.

The dwarf Alberta spruce, discovered in 1904 near Lake Laggan in Alberta, Canada, is cultivar of white spruce, Picea glauca. Cultivars are prone to bud sporting, a phenomenon in which a branch reverts, or mutates back, to the original species. This bud sport, if left to grow, will dominate the dwarf Alberta spruce, as white spruce grows much faster.

White spruce has thicker needles with a slight bluish tinge.

Dwarf Alberta spruce rarely fruits, but the white spruce sport has lots of cones.

Korean Pine

Pinus koraiensis is native to Northeast Asia, Japan, and, of course, Korea.

The cones grow singly or in groups of three,

and are greenish until maturity. Korean pine nuts are widely consumed in China.

This Korean pine is leaning over...

but it still has a roughly conical shape.

It's a five-needle pine. Click on the photo - you can see that there are five leaves in each cluster.

Austrian Pine

Pinus nigra is a native of central and southern Europe and Asia Minor. It was introduced to the United States in 1759.

This is a rather sad-looking Austrian pine. It's suffering from Diplodia tip blight, which has obviously done some damage (dead branches, brown needles) and will eventually kill the tree.

It's a shame, especially because this is one of the sexiest trunks in the cemetery.