The rosemary along the front of my house tends to be somewhat vigorous in its growth. Previously I had been going in with my pruning shears and cutting things back, carefully making sure to prune the long branches back deep inside the shrub so that I wouldn't create a thin, flat wall of foliage on the outer edge that shades out the interior.
Then I got a hedge trimmer and did the lazy thing once or twice, and boy howdy did the rosemary grow a thin, flat wall of foliage on the outer edge that shades out the interior.
It doesn't really show in this picture but a lot of the foliage is not as vibrant as it should be, and when I took this picture I had already pulled a pretty large dead branch from the bottom of the first bush.
Well, I decided to keep going and do a full thinning to allow more light and air to get into the middle of the rosemary so it wouldn't just turn into a green skin overtop of a bunch of dead brown underneath.
This looks a lot more like what rosemary should look like. The closest one is a bit naked on the bottom, but it had a lot of dead branches down low, so it'll take a bit to fill back in there.
Curiously, despite doing a pretty hard pruning, it somehow manages to almost look bigger than when I started. I can guarantee that I removed quite a bit of material, though.
Will I go back to pruning with the shears from now on? No, obviously not. In fact I still used the hedge clippers to shape things back once I had thinned out the growth with the shears.
Speaking of things that are growing, the sunpatiens seem to be reasonably happy with their home.
They didn't really do a whole lot at first, but over the past month or so they've been really puffing out with new growth.
No comments:
Post a Comment