Thread: It's fall.
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Old 10-31-2011, 10:33 AM   #25
Cady Goldfield
Join Date: Oct 2006
Posts: 1,035
United_States
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Re: It's fall.

Oooh. It's one of those big, old arborvitaes? Once the trunk tips, it's down for the count! I have one out back that looks like a bonsai, because the trunk tipped (even though the roots, thank heavens, didn't come out of the ground) and the tree's new branches started growing upward toward the light. Now it is kind of an "S" shape that looks like I spent years painstakingly wiring and training it!

But it sounds like you're doing all you really can to at least keep it under control. The arch sounds lovely. Yews are so much easier - they're the workhorses of the shrub border. You can hack them, lop them, cut them down to nearly nothing, and they come back full and lush. They may break a branch under a load of snow, but if you saw away the ragged break, the trunk will send out fresh new growth in the spring and cover the scar. Arborvitaes, alas, are not so resilient!

I can't believe we're talking about winter stuff when... it's fall.
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