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Someone (*cough *cough) thought it would be a great idea to train a row of crabapple trees into a pleached hedge in the back garden. It’s glorious, but it’s a lot. A lot of delicate blossoms in spring, a lot of dense green privacy in summer, and best of all, a lot of rosy ripe fruit in fall that persists long into winter. Unfortunately, it’s also a LOT of work trying to keep up with a pruning schedule that would maintain the trim garden feature of my dreams. Winter pruning for structure. Summer pruning for (supposed) control. Ladders are involved. Years ago, I had a knot garden. An intricate pattern of neatly trimmed dwarf boxwood. Except when it wasn’t so neatly trimmed. For a while I called it my “loosely knotted” knot garden. Today, some 30 years later, all that remains of that garden fever dream is a series of rotund boxwood balls scattered about the landscape. They are so very patient with me and my lax pruning sessions. So here we are, 7 years into my pleached hedge experiment: tidy and trim on the sides, total party on the top. Oh dear, my pleached hedge has a mullet. Either I need to loosen my grip on this folly or hire help to achieve what I see in my head. I’ll keep you posted. (You’ll find all of my daily posts and garden musings here on Instagram.)
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