Why I Oughta...

We have a front yard Saucer Magnolia tree that was planted in the Summer of 2017 by our landscaper that has been with us since we moved into our new house.  The first time that I posted about this Saucer Magnolia was when I shared a photo of the tree in early August 2017 and talked about how I had 'limb'ed up' the tree to remove some of the lower branching and some newly emerging trunks from the base.   Our tree is multi-trunked (or multi-stemmed and/or multiple trunks) and at the time I was deciding to remove some of the stems/trunks that were shooting out sideways.   By September of 2017, it seemed that the tree had survived the Summer transplant (but...look at the lawn!  yikes!) and was showing plenty of green leaves.  The following February (2018), I did my first Winter check-in on the tree where it was showing off some buds that it had set the previous (first) Fall.  And by May of 2018, the tree put on a show:  flowers .  I didn't include photos of the tree

Back in 2017, I showed part of our landscape plant that was just outside of our kitchen window that called for a variety of perennials and some shrubs including Green Velvet Boxwoods.  You can see the plan here in this post from October 2017 .  Here's a look at that portion of the plan : The plan called for four Green Velvet Boxwood plants.  You can see in the photo at the top of this post that we indeed, planted four of them.  I ended up staggering them a little differently than the plan called for, but they're mostly in the same spot.  The reason for clustering them more closely to the window well is to fit in a spot for our grill.  This [ Garden Diary ] post can be found in the feed over on Hornbeam Hill .  This post is to talk about shaping of these boxwoods.  We have a set of these in our front yard beds directly in front of our porch that you can see in this post that we're trying to let grow a bit.  I'd like them to get larger, but the ones in back?

I was out at the Walmart with one of the kids on a recent weekend and I naturally wandered into the garden section.  They didn't have the outside part open yet, but the inside was being stocked up for all your Spring and Summer needs.  There were pots of all various shapes and sizes, bags of soil and down at the end of the garden center was this display of tools.  They had pruners and clippers and shovels.  But they also had this:  a folding saw.  (oh...and yeah..there's a blade sharpener, too!  But, for this post, let's focus on the folding saw.) Our yard is full of medium and some very mature trees.  Oaks and Maples.  And they loose a lot of little branches and limbs.  So, every Spring (and frankly...all Summer long), our yard is full of sticks.  Plenty of them are small little things.  I can crack them in two with my hands and I throw them in one of the fireplaces.  But others are larger and I can't handle them well.  I don't own an axe - either a large on

As the weather started to warm up, I was able to get out into the yard to do some late Winter pruning on a bunch of items around the yard.  I cleaned up the hydrangeas, used a new extension pruner (more on this at some point) to clip off some water spouts on trees way up in the air and even tended to this pair of Linden trees that we've espalier'd into a horizontal cordon.  Here's a post from September of 2017 where I shared photos and description of the wire setup .  The photo at the top of this post shows the state of these two trees before any pruning.  It is hard to really see all of the cordons or arms, so here's an annotated photo showing the position and lengths of the arms/limbs:  The Greenspire Linden on the left has four levels of cordons and the one on the right has what I'll call 4.5 levels.  I decided to try to prune off the top - what I found out is known as the " apical meristem " in an attempt to drive more growth into the existin

This is the view that I was greeted with most of the days I was in the office in Tokyo doing meetings and client work on my trip in February.  In the foreground where you see the yellowish/tanish ground is the Kōkyo-gaien or "Outer Garden" of the Tokyo Imperial Palace.  If you move your eyes more towards the upper portion of the photo, you'll see the buildings of the Imperial Palace grounds with the large stone driveway area in between the two.  The public grounds is the part that mere mortals like me are able to wander around in, but I think you can make your way around the Palace grounds and take in some nature.  Due to time constraints and uncertainty, I was only able to enjoy the front, public outer gardens you see with the yellow/tan grounds.   And that part was pretty spectacular.  There's tons of things written on the Web about the plants/trees and animals that live in and around the Imperial Garden, but you can start with this entry on Wikipedia that

Walking around Tokyo for a few days in February, I was struck by the parkway trees.  Or 'Street Trees' as they are called.  There's a whole site called "Street Trees of Tokyo" here .  In the photo above you can see two kinds of street trees.  On the left side, you see a more mature, but HEAVILY pruned tree.  And on the right, in the braces, you can see a much younger more columnar-by-nature tree that hasn't been pruned or touched in any way. The trees that are heavily pruned take on an almost columnar form which helps in the narrow areas where they are shooting up in the parkways.  But, I can't help but wonder what they'd look like if they were allowed to grow out.  On the Street Trees of Tokyo site, they point out the pruning thusly : Unfortunately, most of the street trees in Japan are excessively pruned under the excuse of preventing toppling of the trees during the typhoon season in autumn. Consequently, street trees in Japan are in average

Just over a five weeks ago, I posted the first photo of our new/young Saucer Magnolia tree in the front yard of our #NewOldFarmhouse after I had 'limbed it up' for the first time .  It had grown a bit since being installed in June and the pruning I gave it will hopefully fuel its upward trajectory. Above you'll see a photo I took this past week after I gave it another minor pruning where I continued to 'limb up' the main leaders.  I took off a few suckers and removed leaves and shoots that were coming off low on the main branches.   Flipping back and forth between the early August post and this photo tells me the late summer growth is hard to detect in terms of size, but is noticeable in the buds being created.  The leaves - in some places - have become discolored - which has me worried, but I'll post a closeup of it on the blog and show off the newly emerging buds, too. I have big hopes that this tree will grow up - with our family - and be a meaningful

I mentioned in the post about our King Crimson Maple tree last month that we had planted nine trees including a Magnolia tree that we put in our front yard.  That's it above.  After I 'limbed it up' a bit by taking the leaves/shoots/small branches off the bottom few feet of the main trunks of this Saucer Magnolia.  We've never had a Magnolia of our own, but Equation Boy/Man and Vic had one at their house and Greg, our former neighbor had one.  Nat has long fancied them, so in working with Chris Paul at Green Grass Landscaping , we decided to put in a Saucer Magnolia in the front yard. In looking through the care and pruning advice in this piece , I decided to work on the tree to put more of the energy into the top range of the young tree to try to grow it up a bit.  Ours had leaves all the way to the ground, but if you look at photos of intermediate growth Saucers or larger, mature Saucer Magnolias , the successful ones have been 'limbed up' to get the f