It’s been a tough year for some mainstay landscape plants, and my faith in some down the road.
Little did I know when back in February I wrote about how bad the winter was, that spring and summer would turn out even worse for my garden. On top of mortally frozen shrubs, normally-hardy flowers, a massive star jasmine, and blueberries, I lost an eighty year-old cleyera shrub, the last original foundation plant from when my cottage was built in the 1940s.
While most plants survived the freezes, albeit looking like zombie-like horticultural revenants, some were so weakened they were unable to fend off the intense summer heat and catastrophic drought. My Jackson garden went an unprecedented five months where the pavement beneath my truck stayed bone dry. Five months.
I have seen more dead conifers - pines, Leyland cypress, junipers, arborvitae, and more - than in my entire career; once browned out, most will not come back next spring. Worse yet, weakened pines have to reckon with various pine beetles which, though only the size of a grain of rice, can quickly girdle the sapwood underneath protective bark. And honestly sorry, there are no effective treatments, nothing we can do other than have the trees felled or hope they don’t hit anything when they do finally topple. Don’t believe me? Call your county Extension Service or Forestry Commission office.
Magnolias, especially popular semi-dwarf like Little Gem, were also hit especially hard statewide. I lost both my Little Gem and a large native yaupon holly, both species of which were around during Cretaceous times; they may have survived whatever killed dinosaurs, but 2023 was too much.
In my Stoic “if you can’t fix it, flee it, or fight it, flow with it” approach to life’s wrenching setbacks, rather than wring my hands over the loss I’m having a little fun. Spray painted the dead dwarf magnolia glossy black until I get around to removing it, and cut the massive trunks of my old cleyera to waist high and level with one another, and topped them with a glass table top that now shows off my winter succulents.
But my Japanese maples, ligustrum and a few others needed real repair work and pruning to remove dead stems, reshaping, and reinvigorating. Being originally from north Mississippi, I am used to having to prune overgrown or damaged shrubs way back, both at my folks’ and grandparents’ gardens, and while working on MSU’s campus maintenance landscape team. “Rejuvenation pruning” like we do with roses and crape myrtles every year can apply to other non-conifer shrubs. If they have any life left at all, you can cut them to bare, leafless stubs and they should spring right back with the return of warm weather.
If you are removing limbs or large branches, try to not leave stubs, which won’t heal over smoothly and usually leads to internal decay. Cut whatever part you are removing as close as you can to where it starts to grow. Leave just a swollen “collar” - neither a big flush cut or any sort of stub. And no, pruning paints and sealants are not necessary; all trained arborists know this is mostly cosmetic, doesn’t actually prevent insects or decay.
Tough year, but my pruning saw and loppers are my friends for now. However, not being a climate change denier, I am at least wondering about how our local weather may be affected next year or on down the road.
On the chance that this does continue, I’m pragmatic, thinking twice about replacing dwarf magnolias and certain plants with more of the same.
