There is no doubt about it.\u00a0 Wind and wet snow wreak havoc in gardens.\u00a0 This past winter wind weakened branches and wet snow brought them down, except on days when wet snow weakened branches and wind brought them down.\u00a0 The sad results have been visible for the past few weeks on every curb in the area.<\/p>\n
But once all the branches, sticks and other debris have been picked up and chipped, what is left?\u00a0 In my case, a few roses seem to be completely dead and others harbor loads of dead canes.\u00a0 Two butterfly bushes, stalwarts of the garden, had their trunks split down to the ground and now sit with major limbs splayed out at unnatural angles.\u00a0 The privet, with which I have a love\/hate relationship, is mostly fine, owing to the fact that it underwent radical pruning last year.\u00a0 Korean box, which bounded one end of my upper back garden looks like it has gone a few rounds with one of the evil Decepticons from the Transformers franchise. What used to be a low, short box hedge is now a collection of bedraggled, twiggy blobs, no longer strong enough to pull together.<\/p>\n
I count myself lucky that the beautiful red maple on the front strip only lost branches and did not topple right out of the ground, its trunk in the street and roots exposed for the world to see.\u00a0 That fate befell some of the grandest, oldest trees in my town and we are poorer for it.<\/p>\n
Despite all that, hope also abounds.\u00a0 The remaining canes on the damaged roses have broken dormancy and are beginning the annual leafing-out process.\u00a0 The butterfly bushes are returning to life and even some of the trunks that were partly wrenched out of the ground sport new growth.\u00a0 The hydrangeas\u2019 stems are covered with fat green buds and unless we get a very late, very hard frost, those buds will lead to scores of blue flowerheads in late spring or early summer.<\/p>\n
There is no use mourning for all those lost branches, uprooted trees and roses that will never happen.\u00a0 Time only moves in one direction.\u00a0 Instead, encourage the phoenix of your garden to rise from the ashes of winter.\u00a0 I started by removing all the brittle, thoroughly dead canes from the roses, double checking carefully to make sure that none of them showed any signs of life.\u00a0 The bushes are now considerably smaller, but all the remaining canes are healthy.\u00a0 I suspect that warmth, sunshine and a little organic fertilizer will bring them back nicely.<\/p>\n
The butterfly bushes were a mess.\u00a0 Their wood is relatively weak in the best of times and the ferocious winter blasts inflicted a three-way split on my oldest specimen.\u00a0 One of the trunk pieces came out of the ground when I jiggled it.\u00a0 The other two showed new growth.\u00a0 To help give them a fighting chance, I cut a double length of stout garden twine and pulled them back together.\u00a0 Now the plant stands upright.\u00a0 I\u2019ll wait and see what happens next.\u00a0 Weak wood notwithstanding, butterfly bushes are inherently hardy creatures.\u00a0 My money is on survival and future flowers.<\/p>\n
Garden twine fixed the Korean box as well.\u00a0 I was able to tie the individual shrubs back into hedge shape, a job that took a little muscle and a lot of twine.\u00a0 Right now elegant appearance is unattainable, but a return to health might be possible.\u00a0 With the right care\u2014water, fertilizer and mulch\u2014the Korean box hedge may be strong enough to stand on its own by fall.<\/p>\n
I am taking a good hard look at all the spring flowering shrubs.\u00a0 I don\u2019t want to sacrifice this year\u2019s blooms, but dead wood contributes nothing to that process.\u00a0 It will take days to eliminate the dead wood on the lilacs, deutzia, abelia and spirea, but the shrubs and I will feel better for having gotten rid of it.<\/p>\n
I thought nothing could phase rose-of-Sharon, a showy shrub with an iron constitution and prolific self-seeding tendencies.\u00a0 One rose-of-Sharon that I had trained into standard or tree form now looks like someone tried to part its bouffant-like crown down the middle.\u00a0 I am not sure whether to do more work with twine or simply cut it back hard and see what happens.\u00a0 Given the species\u2019 strong survival instinct and late summer blooming habit, I am leaning towards hard pruning.<\/p>\n
If your yard and garden have suffered similar injuries over the past winter, don\u2019t worry.\u00a0 Once the trees and shrubs leaf out, many of the wounds will be camouflaged.\u00a0 Some species also adapt and produce an abundance of new growth in response to damage.\u00a0 It must be Nature\u2019s apology for the wild winter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There is no doubt about it.\u00a0 Wind and wet snow wreak havoc in gardens.\u00a0 This past winter wind weakened branches and wet snow brought them down, except on days when wet snow weakened branches and wind brought them down.\u00a0 The sad results have been visible for the past few weeks on every curb in the … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,2,1,5],"tags":[103,1850,1848,1849],"class_list":["post-2388","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-interest","category-spring","category-uncategorized","category-winter","tag-garden-restoration","tag-shrub-damage","tag-spring-clean-up","tag-tree-damage"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2388","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2388"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2388\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2389,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2388\/revisions\/2389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}