Why prune? New traditions.

Why prune? There are many good reasons. What makes me different? I focus on fitting diversity into your landscape. This means more than preventing a massive silver maple from shading everything else to death. Plus that silver maple costs $5,000 to remove someday and $500 to prune every few years.

Diversity means flowers for bees and hummingbirds starting in early spring, then another and another and another plant blooms though the year. Fruit and seed for wildlife form. Some mixed deciduous hedges may have 15 species of plants (crocus, daffodil, cherry, crab apple, grape, sweetshrub, dogwood, witch hazel, serviceberry, magnolia, rhododendron, maple, elm, oak, leadplant, smokebush, clover and a sedge. (the pictured hedge has only a few species, but it does have nice color and flowers). These can lead to butterflies, salamanders, and song birds (who especially like the dense twiggy protection of the hedge to protect them from cats and hawks). Across Europe (and elsewhere) hedges are an ancient tradition which provide corridors of habitat for wild animals to live and move through. It’s time to adapt that tradition to this time and place.