Jim, this Sunday, Jan 12, there will be a free seminar at the Houston
Arboretum and Nature Center, 4501 Woodaway.
http://www.neosoft.com/~arbor/nature/nature.html. The topic is "Proper
Pruning Techniques of Trees and Shrubs" and the speaker is T.J. Marks,
City of Houston Forester. 2-4 p.m. (rarely do they run a full hours,
more like 1 1/2 hours). This is part of the Urban Nature Series that the
arboretum puts on almost every Sunday. I speak there about 5-6 times a
year on native landscaping. These seminars are fun.

J. Kolenovsky

http://www.celestialhabitats.com

http://www.hal-pc.org/~garden



jim evans wrote:
=

We live in Houston but there's no houston.gardening group, so I hope yo=
u welcome
out of towners.
=

Forgive me, but neither my wife nor I are into gardening. We do the mi=
nimum we
can that keeps the shrubs and lawn from looking awful.
=

We have a lot of 20 year old wax leaf ligustrums that had gotten too la=
rge and
also looked sad as a result of some intractable leaf malady, so last ye=
ar we cut
them back to the bone expecting them to die and we'd then dig them up. =
Instead
they came back and look much better - in fact about as good as ligustru=
ms look.
Now my reason for posting . . .
=

Our experience was so rewarding we have some pittosporum, Japanese holl=
y,
boxwood and camilla that we'd like to cut back a lot too. In this case=
we might
cut them back by half, but not back to stumps like we did the ligustrum=
s.
=

Can we safely cut these plants back so radically?
=

jim

-- =

J Kolenovsky, A+, Network +, MCP
=F4=BF=F4 - http://www.hal-pc.org/~garden/reference.html