Using Boxwood in my Garden

Hello, welcome to my garden. Today I wanted to talk about using boxwood in the garden and this is my very front newly planted garden here. All these plants are one year or less except for the tree and the boxwoods. I have lots of perennials and I also just planted a bunch of annuals, the vinca there. You can see the pink and the white. My name is Kelly and I garden in Northern California in Zone 9b. It's the beginning of July and things are done blooming and I'm needing to cut things back like this cannon. And of course I need to show you this beautiful lithianthus bloom that came out today. Isn't it beautiful? It looks so pretty with the yellow rebecchia. I wanted to talk about my boxwoods today. These boxwoods that I planted probably around 13 years ago when we moved in was the very first plant that I planted in this yard. I had a vision that I wanted them to be real big and just the spears and line this whole driveway and kind of a formal look. There are six boxwoods that I planted along the front of this garden with three barberries in between the boxwoods and I think the red and the green look really pretty together. These little boxwoods, I have five in a row, are in my cut flower garden. I think they're really beautiful, especially in the winter time when there's no other flowers around. Just these little spears. These are probably one of my favorite boxwoods. These are green mountain boxwoods and I really don't have to do a whole lot to them. Maybe once a year when they get put on some new growth they get a little shaggy and I just shave them back down and they stay beautiful all year long. These are English boxwoods and I've never trimmed on them. They've been here for quite a while also and this one on the end, this one here, got a little big so I trimmed it up and this is it. It got burnt on the end there so you can see the difference here. I didn't trim on these other ones and we just hopefully this will bud back out or the green will come back out on it so I'm not going to trim the others. Then I also have some boxwoods behind it lined up on the front of the porch here. I did have five but one of them died so I pulled one of them out and these have been here ever since we bought the property. These are one of the first boxwoods and you can see this one it's either spider mites or it's a gopher that came up underneath it. It might be both. I know these have spider mites really bad in this area so I haven't trimmed them this year. I might go ahead and pull this guy out and replant it with another boxwood a little smaller but these have been in here for years so these don't really get a whole lot of water and my other boxwoods get sprayed with water so it kind of keeps the spider mites down on them but as you can see these guys have seen better days. I'll keep them as long as they look good but I'm thinking this one's going to come out here. Here's another shot of the front garden here in the front of the house. These English boxwoods they just stay really pretty all year long. These are green beauty boxwoods. I planted them this last spring and my vision is for them to make a little pretty little hedge here and I have some a trellis over the over in the middle where the rose is planted so yeah I think they'll be really really pretty once they get a hedge. I planted a boxwood on both sides of this arbor that we walk under and in the winter time they'll have a pretty green spear. Here's a boxwood in this urn here. I love this urn and along the fence I have three more boxwoods just planted in some planters. This is a cone boxwood. I love the way it's shaped. This is the area that I'll be working on next. This boxwood has been here for a long time. It's pretty old and I'm kind of wanting to do something different in this area so right now what I have is these four little boxwoods behind them and I have them shaped up. They need to be reshaped now and I'm going to take this guy out and I'm going to put probably a little bench here with the arbor on it. I think it would be really pretty. So that's my next project and here are some boxwoods around this freshly planted rosacea and the deer have found it. My rosacea is looking pretty puny now and that's too bad because I was hoping it would do good in this area. So this may come out later on and I might have to replace it with something else. There was a Korean lilac here that did really good for years and then I finally took it out and replaced it with this rosacea but the deer just won't leave it alone so we just might have to find something else to replace it with. But the boxwoods I have five boxwoods. It's the English boxwoods surrounded the tree here and I think they look really... I've never trimmed on these guys and they just they continue just to have a really pretty shape to them. So I'm finally getting around to cutting this boxwood back and I'm excited about doing it because it's been a long time since I've been wanting to cut it back. I want to do something different here. I want to put a bench, something bright. I do have four boxwoods back here that I'm going to shape up also but this is going to come out. I don't jump and get rid of things very easily in my garden because I grow to love them because I take care of them. I water them, trim them up but this is just not the right spot for this and I don't think I'm going to try to save it. I've had it for a long time and I've made it into a heart, a topiary heart. I've stuck pots in there and had flowers grow out but had better days so sorry to have to just get rid of it but it's going to be a pretty little spot here so it's time. So guys I just busted my stand for my phone to film this so it's kind of low but I think you can see down here. I'm going to move this statue out for now can't see it back there. Okay so you can kind of see in here now. I'm going to get a rake and kind of clean up the loose leaves in here. Now you can see these boxwoods really good and these boxwoods are really cute when I get them shaped up because I put them up as like lollipops and so they'll be really cute back here and then these, what are these called, loropedilums. They're called loropedilums. Now I'm going to shape them up as really nice and they're standard and they're really pretty in the fall. In the spring they get a real pretty bright pink bloom on them so they light up this little area so yeah we'll get those shaped up real pretty and these guys I'll rake it up. I'm going to water let the water run in here for a little bit and then we'll try to dig up that big root. Okay I'm going to attempt to dig this out. I watered let it suck a little bit with water. I'll move this rock here. Oh yeah that's going to be easy to dig out. Pretty soft. Yep you probably better dig it than I am. Okay it's almost out. My dad went to go get the big bar. That's his prying weapon there because the shovel will break if we try to get it out with the shovel. That was in there deep. All right is it out? Pretty much. My husband Mike finally let me film him. He offered to help me so we're going to give out a shout out to Clayton and Jet from Uncle Gum Gum. Okay I don't know how much I will get done but I'm going to start on these chimneys guys up. I'm just going to use scissors right now and I think because they're not too bad and I don't want to cut them down too too much. I just want to cut them down a little bit cut off mostly these long stems here and magic of the camera I'm going to do this in like two seconds. I got the first one done you can see how cute it looks like a little lollipop and then I'm going to do the next three I'm done with the boxwoods. Don't those look really cute and then the next is the lower petal limbs but I won't be doing those tonight. I've kind of run out of time and of energy so the next will be that the lower petal limbs but isn't that look so much better and I this middle here I'll probably pull this little plastic piece out it's just edging and then put some more dirt in there and we'll decide exactly what we'll do with it. Yeah I'm so glad that I took the boxwood out so much better. Well we're going to end this video now and next week when I come back I'll show you more on the area that I just worked on and also my artificial grass should be here this week and we'll be installing that and doing a little bit more trimming on some bushes so that's going to be this week's work and from now we'll say goodbye and have a wonderful week.