Laidback Gardener Tip of the Day

Make Life Easy:
Choose a Shrub that Fits Your Space

Why prune again and again to keep a shrub in check? It is so much easier to simply choose a shrub that will naturally fit into the space you have available and then let it grow. For example, if you are looking for a foundation shrub to be placed in front of a window 5 ft (1.5 m) above the ground in a bed 4 ft (1.2 m wide), why choose a shrub that will reach 9 feet (3 m) high and 9 ft (3 m) wide? You’ll have to spend the rest of your life trying to keep it under control. It would have been so much easier to choose a shrub that will naturally reach 5 ft (1.5 m) x 4 ft (1.2 m) or less. When you use a shrub of appropriate dimensions, you can simply plant it and let it grow.

This sounds so obvious that you’d think every home gardener would do exactly that, but in fact, you’ll see an awful lot of gardeners hacking away at overgrown shrubs every single year!