Why I Oughta...

One of the projects in the backyard that I've been eying since we arrived home from vacation is to clean up and shape the boxwoods that we have close to our patio in back.  They're pretty shaggy right now and have grown together a bit after being in the ground for four growing seasons.  You can see their current state as shaggy boxwoods below: A little history - these were planted in 2018.  And I pruned them for the first time in Spring of 2019 .  I haven't touched them since.   Why?  Because I found some inspiration both on the Web and in person.  First... these Jacques Wirtz cloud hedges that have grown together and are shaped in one big mass.  And then this mass of boxwoods that are in Memphis at the FedEx Worldwide Headquarters .   The Fall of 2019, they started to put on some size .   And a year later - Fall 2020 - they had grown even closer together .   It seems that the time has come to shape these, but (right now), I don't have shears.  Seems there are a couple

Above is a look at the four boxwoods that are planted right outside of our Kitchen windows next to the foundation.  I last posted a photo of these four shrubs back in April of this year when I was taking off the Winter Burn from them and shaping them a little bit.   They've really grown quite a bit and green'd up on their tips in a nice way. A lot of boxwoods in our neighborhood took hard hits from Winter Burn this past Winter - including a few of ours in front - but these seem to have totally recovered nicely.  The two in front are now larger than the two in back.  I was initially thinking of clipping these into nicely shaped orbs, but now that I've seen the Jacques Wirtz-inspired hedge of boxwoods outside of the Fedex World Headquarters , I'm thinking I can grow these together and make a more cloud-like shape out of all four of them.  The other thing to note in this [ Garden Diary ] post is the other plant in the photo.  No...it isn't a weed.  Well, not a

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?