Garden Tip 225

It is late summer, and the tips of arborvitae branches are drooping and turning brown. This is not a problem, but a sign of a healthy shrub. Arborvitae have small, egg-shaped green cones that develop toward the tip of the branch in April and May. In the fall, the green cones turn brown and enlarge as they open, becoming much more obvious to the casual observer. A quarter to half inch in size, they often appear as dead foliage when seen from afar. Cones develop on shrubs that are eight to ten years old and increase in numbers significantly as the shrub matures.