Sunday, July 22, 2012

Trimming an Overgrown Juniper

My son has an overgrown juniper at his house.  I am sure it was planted to shield the air conditioner from view.  And I am equally sure that at one time it was attractive.  But junipers can grow wild.  I know because I had to remove three of them from the front of my house.  A friend came with a chain and his pick-up truck to pull them out.

When we were at Butchart Gardens, we marveled at the large Japanese garden and how the large shrubs were maintained.  We wondered if we could rescue the juniper.  I went online and googled 'trimming junipers' and the popular consensus was to just get rid of them and start over.  Not the answer I was looking for.  So, I headed over to my son's house where my daughter-in-law and I were going to tackle the shrub.  (Ahem, there was both golf and baseball on TV so one guess where my son was.)

Here is the before:


We started from the bottom and worked our way up.  Two hours later we had this:

And then today, it looks like this:

Quite a difference from what was there.  So, you don't have to throw old the old and bring in the new.  You just need to give it a hair-cut and new style.

5 comments:

  1. Thanks for the inspiration! About to tackle an old juniper just like that one!

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    1. And after all that work my kids sold the house, lol. Good luck with the trimming. I also used the same techniques on some overgrown mugo pines and then planted hostas underneath them.

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  2. What time of year did you trim the juniper? I have a couple I need to trim and also some yews

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    1. Trimmed it in summer. Also just trimmed my yews this past week.

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  3. Did you remove the building in the last photo as well omg lol

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