Precisely Pruned

My favorite day of the gardening season is pruning day.  I would not dream of taking on the job of pruning my evergreens-M and M Flowers has charge of this job. This very moment I am looking out my window past my computer to my hedge of Hicks yews-pruned perfectly level with the horizon.  In front of those yews, my grasses waving in the breeze, and my coneflowers, and the branches of my kousa dogwood.  This is a very good looking picture, believe me.  They do the best pruning it has ever been my pleasure to witness. They come three or four times a season, and doll things up. I work seven days a week, and in return, all I want is a garden that enchants me when I get home. Their formal pruning is remarkably precise and thoughtful-I look forward to it every year.  

Every block of boxwood, every hedge, every shape is detailed with lines set with a level, on pruning day.  They leave nothing to the eye.  My ground swoops and drops and rises again-not so their pruning. Their trimming is exactly level with the horizon.  Formal, and very precise. The look of it lowers my blood pressure.  Pruning a hedgerow of viburnums, lilacs and miscellaneous flowering shrubs takes an eye with a gift for providing air and sun for each individual branch- and a gift for working in concert with the natural growth habit of the shrub in question.  Formal hedges, on the other hand,  demand the idea of level, level lines to go with, and a patient and persistent hand.  They prune nothing with gasoline powered hedge clippers.  This group clips by hand. 

Mindy and her crew pruned these arborvitae, and their skirt of boxwood. What a gorgeous job.  She assesses each plant-she never prunes too hard, if a hedge is not ready. She understands about the long haul.   Properly and expertly pruned hedges can make a formal landscape shine.  Invest in stakes, level lines, and hand shears-should it be your idea to maintain a formal landscape on your own.  Trim carefully-some pruning ideas take years to finish.  Trim slowly, regularly, and patiently.      

The boxwood in this photograph tells all.  Short on the house side-taller on the path side.  The horizon line exists independent of the grade of any given property. Formal landscapes do not repeat the up and down of the ground.   They are all about level. Though pruning to level is a skill, it is easy to spot when a hedge is out of level. It takes great patience to let plants grow up to the height they need to be.  I planted 100 Hicks yews on my property 10 years ago.  The shortest plant on the south side is probably 4 feet tall.  My tallest yew is close to 8 feet tall.  There were more than a few years when none of them were tall enough to prune.         

Whatever landscape element repeats the horizon line rests the eye.  I like the idea of a landscape that is restful. I like quiet, order, santuary, organization, clean and simple, not necessarily in this order, when I come home. My work life is always a big, fluid, and sometimes messy situation.  I like orderly when I get home. For clients, I favor a formal presentation on the street side, so the landscape looks beautiful in every season. The perennial garden, and the vegetables I invariably place in the back.  I do not see the need to place any plant material that has the potential for poor performance in the front.  Designing within the limits of one’s ability to maintain is important.  It is of much interest to me-if the client is a gardener. I try to tailor design to a specific set of circumstances-human circumstances.  Horticulture is not everything; people’s lives are everything. A formal landscape I find easier to maintain than an informal planting. Whenever I see an exuberant and lush perennial garden, I know a lot of committment and work is going on behind the scenes.

 Vertical growing yews handle this type of trimming quite well; there are a number of good cultivars available beyond the trasitional Hicks yew.  Boxwood tolerates shearing the best of all the evergreen plants.  No plant loves to be sheared.  Some evergreens tolerate this treatment better than others.   

This landscape is but a few years old, though the boxwood have been here quite some time.  We moved a lot of what was here into its current configuration. The square footage of this landscape is not so large, but its impact is considerable.   This year, a pruning on the boxwood some two years in the planning, transforms the space. These boxwood spheres-beautiful. I was so delighted to see this space.    


A gorgeous landscape is very much about an idea of the natural world that gets strongly expressed. No small amount of this expression has to do with how that landscape is cared for.  It is one thing to choose plants that compliment one another, in forms that please the eye.  But once that is done, the landscape is only beginning to grow.  I tell clients to not let what they have worked so hard to achieve get away from the them.  It is so important to stay ahead of what a garden needs.

I like having this to come home to.

Comments

  1. How lovely…I never tire of looking at your beautiful images! Formal landscapes are definately my favorite for ease of maintenance and serenity. Lisa

  2. Jennifer in Toronto says

    I could not agree more with you on your philosophy regarding the comfort and serenity from the order, symmetry, and balance of a formal garden. Those shots of your square fountain surrounded by emerald grass and sphere after perfect sphere of boxwood make me swoon. You are clearly a genius. What type of trees are those 4 in a row along the stone wall? Columnar maple? I am trying to achieve an orderly, repetitive effect with 4 Chanticleer pear trees, 2 on each side of a rose and clematis covered pergola, all in front of a wall of emerald green cedars. But, the pears have trellis rust all over the leaves. Have you heard of this problem in Detroit?

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