Hiding under the Hemlock

The young native Hemlocks [Tsuga canadensis]that I see planted in people’s yards on gardening shows are fairly small and dense, but as they get older they thin out considerably, and get very tall. Then, like many evergreens, some of the lowest branches die back because they aren’t getting any light down there. And yes, this is true of shade-loving Hemlocks too.
The rule is to remove deadwood because it’s an entry point for disease, but to be honest I couldn’t see any evidence that that was an issue here. It was more a case of aesthetics.  Aesthetics and weeds. They don’t really show in this photo as far as I can tell, but there was a regular ‘nursery’ of tree seedlings developing in the shade of this Hemlock and the easiest way to be able to weed under there was to get rid of the deadwood first.  I try my best not to leave stubs – both for the trees sake and for mine.  Stubs snag anything they can, look unsightly, and interfere with the trees ability to close the wound left by removing the branch.  The smaller the branch, the smaller the wound and the more quickly it heals.

The weeding still involved crawling around on my hands and knees, but at least there were no longer any dead branches trying to scratch my face.  I did this pruning in the middle of July or the middle of summer (depending which hemisphere you live in), but since all I was doing was removing deadwood and weeding, I could presumably have done it at just about any time of the year.  (OK not the middle of winter, but just because it’s too bloody cold.)

In order to do these photos, I got in under the living ‘skirt’ of the tree.  If you stood back, the work I did wouldn’t be particularly noticeable, it would just somehow look a little lighter and neater, but not in an obvious way.

Rejuvenating a Juniper – Recumbent form

Junipers are rather like shape-shifters – they come in so many forms and sizes.  This one is decades old and had gotten rather overgrown, in particular it was having disagreements with the lawnmower, so it needed some trimming.

Indeed it had been regularly trimmed along the edge where the lawn was, giving the front edge a rather abrupt look.  I couldn’t tell you the exact cultivar, I’m not even sure what variety – it’s not upright, but not exactly prostrate either; although it might have been when it started out.  Certainly the front was low to the ground, but it was nearly four feet tall in the back.                                                    As you can see, it looks totally different from the back.  When a shrub has its back to a fence or wall, people rarely go on the other side, and stuff happens when you aren’t looking!  There was some dead stuff, including some stubs at the back.  My main discovery though, had to do with the trimming that had been done to keep it away from the lawn.  With low-growing, dense, evergreens like this one, the lower branches get shaded by the upper branches, and eventually are only producing growth at the very tips.  Since the tips of the lower branches were the ones that were only ones getting regularly trimmed, there were a number of branches that either had no green growth on them, or so little that if they were trimmed again, they would be bare branches.  Junipers rarely break new growth from bare wood, so it seemed to me that the best way to prune this older shrub was to take out most of the lower branches – anything with little or no growth.

 I took it down a little at the top as well – but not much.  Primarily I wanted to balance out the overall shape so that taking out all that lower, longer growth didn’t make it suddenly look top-heavy. The end result was a shrub that was somewhat smaller and well away from the lawn.  It also looked like it was floating (from the front at least).

Robin came to check out my work and see if I’d uncovered anything tasty.