Fortunatley Pg, I only use what Josh uses, or neem, or some other sort of natural spray..Chemicals is a no no in my home..Good point brought up for those that are thinking of using chemical pesticides... Actually, overkill to me is worth the price to pay to keeping my plants pest free. So far so good. I would isolate mine into a different room, which seems alot easier, but, unfortunately I have no room that is plant free..lol I think I will just have to make an isolation room if treating my new plants becomes to much work.. So far, it isn't work at all. I would rather treat a couple new plants, than treat all of my over 100 plants at the expense of one being infected..;-). Sometimes I even wash each leaf off with soap and water, like giving them a bath.. Just a thought.. Inspecting them closely doesn't always work... It's the eggs hiding in places you do not see, that hatch after a few days that get you without even knowing they are there on your new plants..That is what got me and many others..I inspect with a magnifying glass to see no mites when first brought in, just for the eggs to hatch and crawl over the place only after a few days...Therefore the good suggestion you brought up about isolation for the first week or so...Great points!

We bought a house last year where the inspection showed water on the original foundation where the master bed/bath were added on -- so the dripping never showed on the exterior/new foundation. DH figures out where the water was coming from. The shortest route to the exterior wall was a pvc pipe sticking out of the house crawlspace vent with a 5-gal bucket under it to catch the condensate. It's not pretty or elegant but it works. I'd like something less obvious but he's an engineer -- and if it works, he's not fixing it!

When trimming, keep in mind that this is a matched set of “bookends,” so they should be exact, mirror image duplicates of each other as much as possible. I would think of the trimming project as a challenge … as if you were involved in a manufacturing process making a machine project on a lathe or something along those lines. It would not be at all detrimental to use a tape measure to double check dimensions for matching throughout the process. I would rough out the shapes of both before fine tuning either. The place to begin is standing back well away from them trying to envision what they are to become. If the shrub needs to be moved a little left, right or forward, this is the time to notice it and account for the adjustments you’ll need to make in the cutting. It really barely matters where the plant roots are located. If you the shrub to be 4” to the right, “move” it there with the cutting process. It’s important to envision the finished product before cutting because there is a substantial part of them that won’t get any cutting at all. If you just charged up on them and started hacking away, there’s a good chance you’d cut some wrong parts off. Since the pair of shrubs are matched, the first cuts to make should determine the height. (To match the pair, follow a line on the siding of the house as a guide. Don’t measure from the ground.) Keep in mind that you do NOT want to cut at the place where you envision the limits of the finished product to be (the red line in picture.) There are three reasons for this. As soon as you finish cutting the plant it’s going to grow and if you cut it at the finished height, in a short time it will grow too large. The second reason is because, even though you tried hard to make it a perfect shape, it’s not going to end up as perfect as you’d hoped for. Later, when you need to trim and try to perfect it again, you will want to be cutting only in the newer, softer, easier-to-cut foliage, rather than in the hard, sticky, woody portion. If you don’t cut a little smaller in the first place, you’ll probably end up where the next cutting has to dip somewhere into the woody portion of the plant again. This is a royal pain. If you make the plant a little smaller to begin with, it gives you a “cushion” against having this happen. In general, I find that people have a strong resistance to cutting the plant smaller (the blue line in the picture.) But do yourself a favor and get over this. If you mistakenly cut this plant to a stub, in two years you’d barely remember your error because it would be pretty large again. In cutting it just 6” less than you want it to be, in two months you’ll barely remember or notice that you did that. The third reason you want to cut the plant a little smaller than the “finished product size” is because the more foliage you remove from the top portion of the plant, the greater it is that you expose the bottom portion (the part that is undercut and desperately needs to grow) to more light and an improved chance of quicker growth. Between the yellow line (which represents the ground plane) in the picture and the shrub, there is nothing at all to cut … until you get higher up to the blue line. At this cavity at the lower portion of the shrubs, all the foliage will be left untouched so it can continue to grow as quickly as possible. The goal is to keep the upper portions of the shrub trimmed so that it shades the lower portions the least as possible. Even if you want the shrubs to be larger than what I'm showing, for now you should trim them as I'm showing because you're in a corrective phase trying to regain the lost lower foliage. In your second-to-last picture, it shows how a subordinate, adjacent shrub has encroached on the Yew, which is clearly the more important shrub. The lesser shrub should be trimmed such that this doesn't happen.

A few general considerations first. IME shrubs are less work than the majority of perennials as long as you look up the mature width (rather than just what the tag says) on a reliable site such as the Missouri Botanical Garden’s Plant Finder and plant accordingly so pruning isn’t needed. Regardless of what you choose, have repetition of at least some of the plants to provide cohesion, either by repeating a particular large plant several times down the row, or having large grouping of several kinds of plants, or even having a fronting row of a lower perennial such as Nepeta/catmint (sun) or an overall groundcover such as Veronica ‘Georgia Blue’ which is happy in full sun or full shade. I would also make the bed deep enough so that there is a gap between the plants and the fence at maturity for ease of maintenance. If you allow enough depth for a couple of rows of plants such as one of shrubs and one of bulbs and easy care perennials, you can have a really long season of interest. Here is a winter photo of one of my beds that is a mixed shrub bed , though much larger and denser than you want. It shows the first type of plant repetition, with evergreens that really stand out in winter, each kind in several spots down the bed. Some of the large perennials that repeat can also be seen in their winter shades of gray and tan. Here is a link to a perennial garden that repeats, both groups of the same plants as well as repeating similar flower colors in different plants. It would take more maintenance to do this with perennials as illustrated here, but the concept of repetition will work regardless. [https://www.houzz.com/photos/clamshell-alley-rustic-landscape-portland-maine-phvw-vp~20985226[(https://www.houzz.com/photos/clamshell-alley-rustic-landscape-portland-maine-phvw-vp~20985226) The link below repeats the same 4 plants in a pattern down the whole row. [https://www.houzz.com/photos/garden-spaces-traditional-landscape-new-york-phvw-vp~3417617[(https://www.houzz.com/photos/garden-spaces-traditional-landscape-new-york-phvw-vp~3417617) For plants, Consider some of the panicled hydrangeas such as Little Lime or Little Quickfire, both of which will get to around 5’-6’ in about 5 years in good soil in my part of the US, though I don’t know where you are. If you want something larger or smaller, there are other varieties such as Limelight which reaches 9’ or Bobo which shouldn’t exceed 4’. Bloom is long with the QF and Bobo starting in early July and LL and Limelight about 3 weeks later and continuing for the rest of the growing season here. In my NH garden they are fine in all day sun, though at high elevation or farther south than New England they prefer some shade in the hottest part of the day. If you want some colored foliage, ninebark/Physocarpus has some smaller types such as Tiny Wine with deep reddish foliage and pinkish-white flowers and ornamental reddish seed capsules. They all have a somewhat weeping or mounding shape but vary in size and foliage color- red or green or gold. Gold foliaged ‘Ogon’ Spiraea has white flowers and a slightly weeping shape. if you will be viewing this from indoors in winter, add at least a couple of plants with winter interest such as a the red twigged, variegated leafed dogwood shrub Cornus Ivory Halo or a smaller evergreen that won’t exceed about 6’, perhaps one of the smaller cultivars of false cypress/Chamaecyparis. One option to consider for fastening to the fence is the climbing rose Zephirine Drouhin which has scented pink flowers and is virtually thornless. Mine has had healthy foliage for the 5 years I have had it in my garden with no maintenance other than a spring pruning and fastening it to its trellis. I have emphasized summer interest plants, but you can add spring flowering shrubs that have fall color which as one of the smaller Viburnum plicatum such as popcorn or Newport/‘newzam’ or Fothergilla. You could also underplant the shrubs or perennials with spring bulbs such as Crocus or daffodils.