Hi everyone? Of all the things not happy in the clay soil, these bushes LOVE it. No I can't see property out of our front window.
My question is: is there a proper technique to trim these vertically? My fear is that I'll cut them too short. Is that possible?
by tex_mv
6 Comments
You have a classic case of wrong plant in the wrong place. That big purple monster is doing exactly what it naturally wants to do which is get massive. If you try to just shear the top or face it off vertically you are going to be left with a bunch of ugly bare woody sticks staring right back at you from inside the house. If you absolutely insist on saving it you have to reach deep inside the canopy and cut whole branches all the way back to the main trunk to thin it out and drop the overall height.
Honestly your best move is ripping that giant blob out completely because it is eating the architectural structure of a good looking house. Before you fire up the chainsaw and go buy another mistake at the nursery you should run a photo of your house through the GardenDream web app. You can virtually erase that overgrown mess and test out different lower growing foundation plants right on your screen. It acts as a safety net so you can figure out a proper layered layout that actually fits the scale of your windows before you spend a single dollar or dig a single hole.
You have a great opportunity here to do things right. Remove it all and plant something pretty on the other side of the walkway so you can see it from inside. Foundation plantings are stupid for multiple reasons.
Yeah, we will definitely have to press the reset button. We have friends/neighbors w the same bush and ours is by far the biggest one.
This is the first year where I’ve had difficulty seeing out the window 🙈
Is that lorapetalum? You can cut it back to the ground and it will regrow. Very quickly.
Long term, it is the wrong plant for the wrong place, but it does have significant roots, so not easy to pull out.
Yea I told the wife we gotta pull it. Not thrilled, but it is what it is.
I imagine I’ll use a chain and my pickup to pull it
Wow! Remove all of them and start over. Even trimming back, they will be on top of each other. They offer nothing aesthetically pleasing. The house is attractive without being dwarfed by this.