I do my gardening in a zone 5/6. I have to protect all of the Macrophyllas if I'm going to get any flowers. I would bet that you shouldn't have too much trouble over the actual winter months. These plants can take the extremes of cold that you should be expecting. The real problem for you ( and me, too, actually) is the fluctuations. It's Luis' "ker plunks" that end up getting us. Dirr has said that he sees better flowering in a place like Cape Cod than he sees in Georgia, even though Georgia is a much higher zone. That's because, at Cape Cod, you don't get the ker plunks. The ocean, the native habitat of these Macrophyllas, keeps the temperature moderate. No ker plunks. Being relatively close to the ocean might save you somewhat. At least in many years. You don't need to worry so much about doing something before the first frost unless it happens like tomorrow or something. As long as the weather follows a moderate path into the winter, you wouldn't have any problem at all. I don't do anything here until after the frosts come. The real problem for you, I would bet, is next Spring. That's when the damage is likely to happen. Typical for us people away from the moderating ocean, just like interior Georgia, is for a nice long spell of warm weather in Spring, fooling the plants into thinking that it's all over, with the buds opening up, only to get zapped with the ker plunk that follows. If you want to take your chances and do a minimal amount of work maybe you should consider not doing anything elaborate over the winter, but be ready to run out in the Spring when we get that night or two of cold and cover the plants with sheets of plastic and/or some other insulating material. Nobody said it was going to be easy. Fun maybe, but not easy. Good luck. Hay

My message was cut off ( I closed it while posting) Alex I have 2 bradford pears in my front yard and 2 in my backyard. They are a poor choice. They never get tall and only get wide. They are prone too damage from snow and wind and they drop messy fruit. The only thing good I found about them is that they can take topping on a regular basis. Most trees will die from it. I chop the top of my trees every few year. They look like big ficus trees. The other thing good about them is that they keep their leaves until they get frosted . My tree still has leaves on it after all other trees dropped theirs. The builders plant them because they are the cheapest tree there is.

Be careful too with bought compost. In the fall we mixed up soil for the new garden boxes using the Mel's Mix recipe and --nothing grew. The garden was like stepping into Munchkin land -- after three months the lettuce transplants were still the same size as when I put them in (I'd started the seeds in cups before transplanting out when they were about 2 inches high), a lot of stuff started out great from seed and then, after getting about an inch high either sat there or the leaves turned yellow and died. It turns out that the expensive compost we bought was NOT fully cured. This spring I had to take all the dirt out and just put garden soil in (could not go to the expense of buying all that vermiculite again). Everything is now growing apace.

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.