The Anatomy of Trimming

Weather: Lots of rain the past three days.

Although the days aren’t quite as hot, nothing has recovered. No one has any annuals blooming. One person lost all their melon plants this week.

Last useful rain: 8/11. Week’s low: 55 degrees F. Week’s high: 96 degrees F in the shade.

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid roses, trumpet creeper, silver lace vine, red-tipped yuccas, sweet peas, Russian sage, buddleia, bird of paradise, roses of Sharon, hollyhocks, purple garden phlox, datura, squash, melons, coreopsis, blanket flowers, cultivated sunflowers, corn tasseling

What’s blooming beyond the walls and fences: Trees of heaven, buffalo gourd, bindweed, green leaf five eyes, silver leaf nightshade, alfalfa, white sweet clover, yellow mullein, leather leaf globe mallow, lamb’s quarter, yellow evening primrose, Queen Anne’s lace, plains paper flowers, goat’s beard, pigweed, Russian thistle, Hopi tea, toothed spurge, prostrate knotweed, native sunflowers, gumweed, wild lettuce, horseweed, goldenrod, golden hairy asters, quack grass, seven-weeks grama

What’s blooming in my yard: Betty Prior and miniature roses, yellow potentilla, caryopteris, fernbush, garlic chives, catmints, lady bells, calamintha, winecup mallow, sidalcea, blue flax, coral beard tongues, sea lavender, lead plant, Dutch clover, white spurge, tomatillo, pink evening primroses, Saint John’s wort, large-flowered soapwort, David phlox, perennial four o’clock, Mexican hats, African marigolds, chrysanthemums, chocolate flower, plains coreopsis, black-eyed Susan, anthemis, purple coneflower, Mönch asters

Bedding Plants: Wax begonia, pansies, sweet alyssum

Tasks: Trimming is impossible when stems are wet. Have spent my time laying the last section of a block walk.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, chickadees, hummingbird, geckos, larger monarch butterfly, bumble bees, crickets, grasshoppers, hornets, small ants

Weekly update: Trimming dead wood is tedious. No wonder people take chain saws and electric pruners to their shrubs. While they get the satisfaction of instant neatness, they miss the contact with the plants that reveals their inner natures.

Most of the shrubs I’ve been clearing of dead wood are in the Rose family. They share a habit of leaving short bare twigs, though the reason seams to vary.

The actual roses seem to abandoned the parts of stems that held flowers, and die back to a node where a new stem grows.

The peaches simply leave dead sticks, usually on the undersides of branches. I think they once held fruit, though not all fruit is isolated that way. A lot seems to be directly attached to the branches.

Sandcherries, on the other hand, extend their branches and abandon the twigs farther back, leaving a nest of dead wood in the center. WheI pruned one back this spring to clear a path, new wood sprang from the cut area, and the branches are back in the way.

Notes on photographs: All taken 5 August 2019.
1. Garlic chives (Allium tuberosum) have gotten much taller this year. Partly it’s because the black locust that shaded them is gone, and partly because they’ve gotten more water.

2. Dr. Huey rose stem that’s died back. This particular variety produces so many flowers that deadheading it would be worse that removing the dead ends.

3. Peach (Prunus persica) stem holding this year’s fruit, and a dead one on the underside that snags whatever passes under it.

4. Sandcherry (Prunus besseyi) leaves at the end of a stem riddled with dead twigs.