These long-lived queens of the garden are like Shakespeare's Cleopatra: Age cannot wither them, nor custom stale their infinite variety. Some bear flowers, berries, cones, or sharp, prickly spurs. Others bring the scent of the forest to the backyard. They may be any shade of green or tinged with gold, silver, bronze, purple, or red, with leaves as small as a baby's fingernail or as large as a toddler's forearm. They grow into pyramids, columns, and globes that form billowy masses or dense, sharp outlines. One may tower over the house, soaking up the sun, another creeps along the ground, happy in the shade.

       NEEDLES AND BROAD LEAVES

       The two basic kinds of evergreens are easy to tell apart. Broad-leaved specimens with wide-bladed leaves that shine in the sun include holly, barberry, boxwood, cotoneaster, privet (most varieties), firethorn, rhododendron, and azalea. Needle-leaved types have small scalelike or needlelike leaves, often surfaced or lined with blue-white or gray markings. The needles may form fernlike sprays or stiff whorls on the branches. Some of the well known are cedars, hemlocks, firs, pines, yews, junipers, and arborvitae ("tree of life"). Each has its own place in any garden.

       Conifers, whose name is an abbreviation of the Latin term that means cone bearing, are among the hardest working needle-leaved evergreens. Generally they're the toughest and most cold-resistant type of evergreen, with tremendous variety in form, color, and texture. They combine great usefulness (much of the world's timber and turpentine comes from conifers) with extreme beauty. About the only thing they don't provide is much excitement. Poets write about daffodils and painters paint sunflowers, but few people cross the street to rhapsodize over a pine tree.