Bushes and Shrubs
Bushes and Shrubs
Many new gardeners automatically think about flowers and plants when they first start creating their gardens. They dream of blooming tulips, climbing flower vines on a trellis, or sprouting kitchen herb gardens. What they don’t often realize though, is that no garden is fully complete without some select choices of bushes and shrubs.
Now the unfortunate flip side to the above scenario is the inexperienced gardener who decides to plant bushes and shrubs everywhere – particularly right next to the house. There’s nothing specifically wrong with planting bushes in front of your home, but most new gardeners make one classic mistake time and again… they plant things too close together when the plants are small.
When you first buy a new bush or shrub, it might only be about eighteen inches to two feet tall. So when you plant it, the area it’s planted in can look quite bare. So new gardeners will often plant another bush or shrub very close to that one, to try and make the area look prettier. They don’t always realize that the small bush they’re planting now, will end up three to five times larger over time. So putting two bushes just six or twelve inches apart when they’re small might look quite nice, but as those bushes become six, ten, or even fifteen feet tall and spread out too, you find yourself with a thick tangle of bushes that are much too close together.
Now this isn’t always a problem, but it is a lot of work to try and fix once the bushes have gotten much larger. The problem though, is when you make these same mistakes when planting bushes next to your home. Many people will put a new bush in front of the living room window for instance. But since that bush is quite small when they plant it, they put it too close to the wall of the house. When the bush gets to full size in this case, it can become a much bigger problem. The branches can be trimmed if they’re scraping the window or wall too much, and that’s a lot of extra work by itself. The real problems though, happen underground.
Most bushes and shrubs have root systems which spread out as well as going down into the ground. If a bush says it should be planted five feet away from another, there’s a very good chance that the roots for that bush will extend several feet outwards from the base. In some cases the roots will spread much farther than the actual branches above ground do too. And when the roots spread that far, they can dig into the house foundation and cause a lot of major structural damage.
So the first thing you need to do when planting bushes and shrubs is to pay close attention to the planting instructions. If it says the bushes should be planted at least ten feet away from each other, then be sure you have them spaced that far. And if you put it next to a house, be sure to give it plenty of space there too. If you don’t like the bare look when your shrubs are still young and small, simply fill in the extra space with some colorful annuals until the bushes start getting much larger.
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