These would be the bushes that used to grace the front of our house. Â Last year, we decided to trim them back and got a little over-zealous.
And, we might have used a little weed killer near them, while trying to…
Well. Â Kill weeds.
Too add insult to injury, we had an unusually cold winter.
None of this was very appreciated by our lovely bushes, and as spring began, we noticed that there were very few green leaves on our bushes. Â Hmm? Â In fact, we saw a lot of brown.
We scratched our heads. Â Did our bushes usually die off and then spring back to life? Â We’d not really noticed before.
So, we called our friend Larry, who also happens to be a landscaper and has done work for us before.
He took one look and declared them dead and/or dying. Â Likely, from a combination of the above mentioned trim / poison / cold.
We had no choice.
The bad news? Â Having almost every bush in front of your house yanked out costs more than you’d think.
The good news? Â Planning the house front landscape ourselves, rather than adopting what the previous owners put. Â Which was ALL green.
Looking forward to seeing some knockout roses and hydrangea in there…
In the end, keep this in mind.
Don’t ever let us tend your bushes.
April 20th, 2014 at 7:01 pm
Ya could have titled this one “The Bush Story”…the first thing everyone would think of is good ‘ole George W!!
I believe you when you said replacing all of these bushes costs more than you’d think…true!!! But I love those big blue-ish purple-ish hydrangea bushes and the pink ones!! Oh yes, and roses will definitely look great, too!! Looks like you guys have your work cut out for you!! We have one Japanese bush that died years ago…it was right in front of our bedroom window. But all the rest of them seem to be doing well…and we’ve had them for years in front of the porch. (On the other side are yellowish-green bushes…to not have so much green…like you said!!)
Ok…get your green thumbs in gear & go for it!!
April 22nd, 2014 at 12:49 pm
Keep in mind that hydrangeas look pretty when they are blooming but for a lot of months from late fall until late spring, they look awful. We have one that is really pretty when it is in bloom but the rest of the year, it looks like something as dead as your shrubs. Right now there are some green leaves coming out but there won’t be flowers for quite a while. The blooms don’t really last that long and the bush will stay green a little longer than the flowers.
Connie also has a lot of knock-out roses and they do quite well. They are hard to trim and must be cut back during the winter (he cut his back in early March). They now have lots of leaves popping out and I don’t know when there will be blooms. You have to do a lot of treating roses because they are so susceptible to disease. The knock-out roses aren’t as bad as regular roses but they aren’t completely disease resistant.
We know how expensive it is to add or replace shrubs. It is also expensive to have trees removed. We recently had a huge pine tree removed that was very close to the kitchen window. The tree removal outfit used a crane that was parked in the street. With the crane, they could lift the entire top of the tree up and over to the street to be cut up. Then they did the same thing to the trunk. It cost way too much but at least there was little trash in the yard and nothing crashed into the roof.