The couple who owned this house before me built it and lived in it for nearly 50 years. The wife made this property her life’s work and that’s apparent through the constant blooms and beautiful mature shrubbery/flowers. I’ve been living here for a year now, and feel like I’ve failed in keeping it manicured. I am only 24 and don’t have much experience keeping a yard, so I am completely lost. I keep it weeded and watered, but besides that have no idea what to do.
The Peonies died in June, I am learning now I was supposed to “dead head” them, will they die now? Or can I just cut them back completely and wait for them to grow back next year?
When do I cut the hydrangeas back?
How do I get the roses to stop drying up and dying?
The roses that aren’t drying up and dying are vining like crazy to the point that they’re falling over. Should I cut back the vines, or just give them some sort of support to climb up/hold them up?
I’ve included pictures so that you guys could give any advice you feel is necessary. What can I do to make this look more manicured and put together?
The backyard is another mission entirely….
by wherediamondwgrow
8 Comments
For context I live in the PNW in zone 8b!
No advice as none of those you’ve shown are something I’m familiar with.
just super impressed that at 24 you care .
Good luck op the real experts will be in shortly!
Let peonies stand all summer to gain energy for next season. Cut them back after it gets cold. Deadheading is completely optional, they are very hardy. Roses take constant pruning, so that’s the only way to deal with them. Cut off wilting roses all the time, but again, if won’t damage them if you don’t.
Edit: hydrangeas are a bush, so you never cut them back- (endless summer? I didn’t see them in a picture) you can cut off the blooms as soon as they fade.
You can cut the hydrangea buds now, up to the second bud.
Lucky you to have this property and have an interest at a young age. My advice is don’t sweat it. Smell the roses. 😊Home gardening is a life time learning hobby. Lots of good advice by others on this post. Start simple, small. Don’t try to tackle it all. I work one area/bed at a time and enjoy what you get done. You will have successes and failures. Maybe join a local gardening club, lots of expertise and like minded potential friends.
Wow what a beautiful yard! You have actually done one of the smartest things you could have done. You went a whole year just to see what plants were there and when (or if) they bloomed.
Some hydrangeas bloom on new wood, so they can be trimmed back to 1/3 oftheir size now (early fall).
The iris (it looks like iris, at least) can be divided in the fall. Make sure their rhyzomes (thick tubers, look kind alike small potatoes)are about 1/2 exposed to the air.
The iris like drier soil, other rhyzimes tend to rot. So you can divide them, makes small mounds of dirt, and plant the iris on top.
Roses can be trimmed back, but I don’t have any so I cannot say much about them.
Holly bushes — wait until mid January to early February trim them back. If you trim them now, you will spur new growth that will still be too “young” when the first freeze comes along.
You can google for a Cooperative Extension service/group near you. They are all about providing information on plants and crops.
I live in 7a/7b in north Georgia, so UGA has a great Cooperative Extension that helps me. I just don’t know what universities are in your area.
Also, you can “dead head” your rhododendrons after they bloom, if you want them to focus on growth. Otherwise, they focus on making seeds.
Just be careful! Because in spring, the new shoots will be right at the base of each flower. So you can gently break the flowering, but you want to leave the stems/stubs for the new growth.
You are going to learn so much, YouTube is your friend, I’m particularly fond of the British show Gardener’s World
Really no substitute for the real world experience of pruning something and seeing how it responds, trust that by and large plants respond favorably to having old growth pruned back so it can focus its energy on new growth, for perennials anyway. Herbaceous perennials are ones that die back entirely and then regrow the next spring, like your peonies
If you just mean the individual rose blooms are drying up and dying then that’s just what they do, there’s all sorts of roses with different growth habits but unless you want the hips (the seed filled fruit part that grows after the bloom dies) then deadheading them will encourage more blooms.. the vining ones you mentioned could very well be the wild rootstock that some other rose was grafted onto but is now sending up canes from that wild rootstock.. the easiest way to prune roses is to take the top third of the plant away sometime around thanksgiving and then the middle third (half of what remains after fall pruning) around Valentine’s Day. You can also prune individual canes, oftentimes to the last visible bud or some folks will go to the first leaf with 5 leaflets on it. I’m also in the PNW, roses kind of love it here, some rose specific fertilizer in spring and fall and after the first flush of flowers isn’t a bad idea but also something I forget to worry about sometimes. Mostly you’ll run into fungal issues ie blight or powdery mildew so try to water them at the base and keep the centers of the plants pruned enough to allow some nice airflow
Caveats here would be that climbing and rambling roses will take longer to bounce back from a severe haircut, something I could have learned through research but in actuality learned from cutting them too hard, but they all came back
My philosophy with pruning anything is to cut out the obviously dead material, then go after crossing branches at which point there’s far less aesthetic decisions to even worry about
Pruning in the summer leads to slower growth, pruning in the winter leads to more vigorous growth.
Don’t stress out. You’re going to have plants die. But goddamn there are so many cool plants at nurseries, volunteering at your friends place and readily propagated next to the curb in your neighborhood. Nice way to meet your neighbors, anyone worth knowing will gladly let you take a few cuttings.
On that note, if you see someone working in a yard that looks nice don’t be shy about chatting them up, most people that put the time into making their spaces verdant are delighted to tell you anything you wanna know about it
Compost.
Mulch.
TLDR: take a deep breath, you’ve got the rest of your life and will never run out of things to learn about plants