RETHINK YOUR SHRUBS
Winter provides the perfect opportunity to assess your planting and take action
With our gardens laid bare and their winter structure revealed, now’s the perfect moment to assess whether your key shrubs are delivering what you want. All too often we over-plant shrubberies in an a empt to quickly fill a garden but this can lead to crowding, shading and malformed growth. Taking a step back at this time of year gives us gardeners a chance to decide on which shrubs to may want to remove a shrub simply to allow others in its vicinity to flourish without shade or competition. If the shrub you are removing is huge it may be worth hiring in a stump grinder. These powerful machines remove both stump and roots with li le effort. A word to the wise though; avoid the chipped wood pieces mixing with the surrounding soil. Fresh, woody material like this can suck nitrogen out of the earth in its first year of breakdown. other words removing the lower branches of a shrub to give it clear stems and a defined canopy – is one approach. This not only beautifies the form of the shrubs but reduces shade in the garden. An alternative approach, which works for numerous fine-leafed shrubs, such as pi osporum, cotoneaster, euonymus and conifers such as thuja, is to clip them into topiary forms. The shrubs and conifers on my list will take radical reforming prunes to carve them into balls, columns, pyramids or cubes.