Spring is a time of new beginnings. Energized by longer days and milder temperatures, you have the opportunity to set goals and clear the way to realizing them. The health of our gardens is not unlike that of our bodies. Skip meals because you’re too busy or overindulge in fats, sugar, or alcohol, neglect your skin and hair, and you will look and feel like a wreck. Fertilize and water your garden too much, too little, or at the wrong time, ignore pests, prune too much or not at all, and your garden will also degenerate. Now is the time to do some basic cleanup and to adopt strategies that improve the well-being of your garden.

Because the plants are happy to be where they are in a well-designed xeric garden, they tend to thrive given less time and fewer resources. Benign neglect is less of a problem than overenthusiastic and misdirected maintenance, but neither extreme is ideal. Two things are critical to appropriate landscape management: the designer and caretaker must share the same vision of what the garden should be, and though there may be fewer maintenance chores in a xeric landscape, finesse and timing are important.

The mix of plants in the garden will determine what needs to be done and when the effort will yield the best result. If the plan is to fill a shady corner with Burkwood viburnum surrounded by spring bulbs, then someone tramples the newly emerging bulbs while shearing the shrubs into cubes in February, the viburnums will not only fail to perfume the garden with their spicy scent—all that potential hauled to the compost pile a month prematurely—but the bulbs may also bloom poorly. Another misguided effort might involve a desert willow, a chastetree, and a row of New Mexico olives being turned into mushroom-shaped garden gnomes. Again energy is wasted and the design is thwarted. Unless you live in the Magic Kingdom, the Disneyesque practice of shearing shrubs is not a job well done. Whether inflicted by an amateur on his or her own garden or by a self-advertised “landscape professional,” excessive pruning of any sort is not good gardening, and shearing in particular is a practice that reduces flowering, increases water use and pest activity, and insults the character of plants. Once a plant is sheared, it takes patience and a skilled hand to undo the damage.

 

 

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