Pruned Hedges

Weather: This was the first week that temperatures did not go below freezing. We had a good rain on Tuesday with brief showers on Friday and Saturday that watered in fertilizer. The snowy winter may have killed a buddleia, but the spring bulbs and rhizomes are flourishing. The continued moisture may be setting up summer-blooming plants for hard times when it gets hot and dry.

Last useful rain: 4/23. Week’s low: 34 degrees F. Week’s high: 80 degrees F in the shade.

What’s blooming in the area: Apples peaked, purple leaf sandcherries, flowering quince, forsythia peaked, lilacs, redbuds, Dutch iris, tulips, daffodils, donkey spurge, lavender moss phlox

What’s blooming beyond the walls and fences: Alfilerillo, tansy and purple mustards, hoary cress, western stickseed, oxalis, fleabane, native and common dandelions, June and cheat grasses; elm seeds in the air

What’s blooming in my yard: Sour and weeping cherries, sandcherries, choke cherries, fruiting crab apples, grape hyacinths, vinca; pansy that wintered over

What’s reviving/coming up: Cottonwoods, Russian olives, black locust, grape vines, Virginia creeper

Tasks: Spent my time digging out brome and cheat grass that were invading the mums and daylilies. I planted coreopsis and blanket flower seeds in openings, and fertilized the mums. It may not be the right time, but it’s the convenient time.

Animal sightings: Chickadees, cabbage butterflies, small ants. The small bees prefer the Siberian peas and lilacs to the crab apples and sour cherry. The neighbor’s cat is back. An earthworm was sluggish when it was uncovered.

The quail landed on my back porch rafters again. When I chased it off, it flew under the porch roof of my neighbor. I suspect it’s hiding from the black hawks that have been soaring overhead.

Weekly update: Neatly pruned hedges always mystify me. I wonder why anyone would bother to plant something that flowers, only to chopped the branches so it never blooms. If someone wants to go to the trouble of maintaining a clipped hedge, there are evergreens that are ideal, and they don’t even drop their leaves in the fall.

The shrubs that get this treatment are the ones that tend to have lots of dead wood that needs trimming out: spirea, forsythia, roses of Sharon. Apparently some garden advisor sometime in the past thought, since you have to do the work anyway, why not make the effort pay with something visible.

The spirea takes it, though it looks like it has mange when it blooms. One person keeps a row of roses of Sharon cut down to low squares. The lavender flowers looked pasted on in summer. The forsythia does not do well when it gets cut arbitrarily. Some years it can take it, and others it can’t.

Privet not only does ok, but volunteers to be a green hedge. Mine have begun to send out suckers along the wettest land, which means in a line. I don’t prune mine, so they fill in and bloom in late spring. As I mentioned in the post for 21 November 2010, my aesthetic reasons developed when I had a neighbor in Michigan with a privet that grew so large it resembled a tree.

Lilacs are another shrub that sends out suckers that form copses. A couple people in the area have them in hedges. The one is tall and doesn’t look like it’s ever been pruned. Another died after people strung an irrigation line through the top branches and ran water in winter than froze. I don’t know if the ice killed it, or if it was suffering and the water was a fatal attempt to save it.

My lilacs, especially the uncultivated species, have created forests of stems. They compete with each other for light so the flowers appear up higher every year. I probably should cut them down a little, but I’m always afraid insects will invade if I do it during the summer.

Notes on photographs: Photographs taken 27 April 2019.
1. Common lilac (Syringa vulgaris) on left and Paul Thirion cultivar on the right. You can see the dense number of stems on both.

2. Common lilac suckers that found the hose laid down last summer.
3. Cheyenne Privet (Ligustrum vulgare) that has suckers to the left.