One of the landscape plants I inherited with the house is a baby sage, salvia microphylla. It produces some lovely small red and white flowers. Sort of.
Trouble is that it wasn't producing much in the way of leaves. It just kept getting leggy and leaf-bare, with lots of twiggy growth capped with a tiny bit of green and some flowers. Ugly as sin. You can see how it looked in the left of this photo, it's the pile of dead branches sprinkled with a few leaves.
Truly hideous.
I tried watering it more, watering it less, fertilizing it, applying iron sulphate to reduce soil alkalinity, trimming out the dead wood...
I was almost at the point of digging it up and replacing it with something else, but in a last ditch fit of laziness, in an attempt to save myself from having to dig another hole, I decided to just cut it back hard and let Darwin sort it out.
And sort it out it did.
So yeah, it turns out that sage responds really well to hard pruning.
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