Arborvitae is the plant most people have in mind when they want a screen: a narrow green column, quick to fill in, inexpensive, and available everywhere. Thuja, a cypress relative, not a juniper and not a cedar despite what it gets called.
It is also one of the least well-suited screening plants for this part of Colorado, and it is worth saying that plainly before somebody plants thirty of them.
Two problems, and both are specific to conditions here. It wants consistent, even moisture, and its flat sprays of foliage lose water steadily through winter while the ground is frozen — so a dry, windy, sunny January turns it brown and crisp, worst on the exposed side, and it does not always recover. And of everything in this catalog, arborvitae is close to the top of what deer will eat. A hedge of it near open ground can be stripped to a browse line in one hard winter.
Where it does work
None of that makes it a bad plant. It makes it a plant with conditions, and inside those conditions it does the job as well as anything.
Arborvitae works on a sheltered site with irrigation and no serious deer pressure — an enclosed back yard, a north or east side, a courtyard, somewhere out of the prevailing west wind and on a regular watering schedule. In town, fenced, watered, it can be an excellent screen for decades.
What it does not survive is the situation it gets bought for most often: an exposed property line on the edge of town, backing onto open ground, planted and then largely left alone.
What to plant instead when the site is exposed
If you need a screen on an open, windy, deer-visited property, there are better answers and they are not more expensive over the life of the planting:
- Upright juniper — the closest thing to an arborvitae's form and habit, and vastly better adapted. Drought-hardy, wind-hardy, and deer largely ignore it.
- Rocky Mountain juniper — native, taller, a genuine windbreak tree rather than a hedge.
- Austrian pine — where there is room for a wider screen and time to grow it.
We will sell and plant arborvitae where it suits the site, and we would rather tell you up front where it does not. A screen that fails in year four costs more than the right plant did.
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