I wonder why you are needing to cut out large amounts of dead wood annually. (or did I misunderstand?)

Give it some mulch around the plant, though leave the area immediately around the trunk bare, so that the mulch isn't against the stems' base. If you have a long period of dry weather, stick your finger down into the soil to see if it needs to be watered.

Babs, I've got two of these, and they have major branches die back regularly, and for no apparent reason. Mine are in a back garden, so I let it go for a couple of years, but OP's seem to be front and center, so the yearly dedeading makes sense, although it sounds like it shouldn't.

these are in the back yard. I thought it wasn't healthy to leave dead wood.

We get a lot of wind, almost like we're in a wind tunnel. A roofer agreed; said our roof damage from the last windstorm looks like 60mph+, even though the nearest town's weather officially maxed at 45 mph. I figured taking out the dead wood would minimize wind damage due to less rubbing together.

In the first photo you can see bare branches sticking out at the top, those were fine last summer, but not leafing out this year. Glancing at it today, I counted at least 3 large dead branches in one and two in the other.

I will try mulching around them, maybe more branches will survive this year.

BTW, we are in the eastern panhandle of West Va, 8miles south of Maryland and 6 miles north ofVirginia. I think we're zone 5b or 6. According to a WV Agriculture soil map, we have Buchanan Loam which is 50% or more of broken shale and clay, "very stony."

Kathleen, you could do a renewal pruning on them. First, this too requires removing dead wood. Definitely a good practice regardless, even if for no other reason than it rapidly improves the appearance. Next, getting down as low to the ground as possible, remove the thickest, oldest stems. This may set back the total number of blossoms for the following season, but the payoff is worth it. What this does is, it leaves only the youngest, most vigorous stems, and it is these which will eventually have the most flowers, foliage, etc.

They're probably in decline because of the activity around them that has made the soil bare and compacted looking. Cutting on them won't make up for this - you need to address the rooting environment, the previously suggested mulching being probably the most likely thing to produce a visible improvement.

........but you'll still want to remove dead canes and do a thorough renewal pruning at some point. I didn't say before, but another technique would be to coppice them, that is, cut the entire plants down. Multi-stemmed shrubs usually put out a lot of new stems following this treatment.

Of course, anything else you can do, such as mulching around the, will help with general vitality/vigor. And like nearly all plants, if it should turn quite dry, a good soaking of the entire area would be helpful.

I'll add them to my watering list for August and September, the months we get the least rain.

About the bare soil: that's from the chickens who are allowed out of their pen from first snowfall until mid April. They really help with the tick and Japanese Beetle problems. The soil was dry in the photos, but no harder than every where else in the yard. It's getting a good soaking in this afternoon's thunderstorms.

I have to fill in the holes the chickens leave behind every spring. I used dirt from elsewhere on our 3 acres last year, I'll buy mulch this year for around the shrubs.

The best looking viburnum similar to yours that I ever saw was where free running chickens spent a lot of their time. The site was on a hill with a high water table. I think your plants aren't getting enough summer water to fully penetrate the chicken scratch mulch.

Maybe I need to pay more attention to rain patterns. This week, 3 days, last week only 1. We had a rain gauge, but it didn't survive the ice storm that followed a snow storm. Time to buy a new one, might as well count on a new cheap plastic one every spring.

I have a friend who has had one of these for years. She cuts it down to the base every year and it still grows back very large and has flowers the size of basketballs! She's in zone 5.

cutting it down and letting it start over, sounds enticing, but risky. It reminds me of old roses, such as grandifloras and florabundas. At one house I had several that were around before I was born. My grandmother taught me to cut them to 2' tall or less in December (zone 7/8) so they wouldn't take over the yard and to agressivly cut "water shoots" all summer.

Those aren't shrubs in the conventional sense, were developed for use in bedding schemes where an above ground framework of normal size and longevity is not retained.

I'm not sure what you mean by "framework of normal size and longevity is not retained."

Does that mean they were bred to be a temporary background fill or property line identifier? Or do you mean they were meant to be smaller?

I wish they were aligned differently so they'd diminish the prevailing winds which parallel the house. I need to add more layers of perennials and large shrubs if we're ever to have an outdoor sitting and BBQ space.

Okay, now I get it. The comparison worked for me because we had the ideal location for roses. Some got as big as these viburnums. My biggest challenge was to keep them at a reasonable size, not over 6' tall for the grandifloras and under 6' wide for the florabundas. I need to find the photos in one of my bins and scan them.

Of course some modern bedding roses grow tall if allowed to but do not look like many think they should when in that state. In fact the idea that rose bushes should look like cut hybrid tea roses from the store stuck in the ground is so dominant that other types of roses may often not be recognized as such.

I could talk old roses for hours, but I'll stick to one example. The town of Havilah, Kern County, CA, was more ghost town than the original county seat the first time I visited in the 1950s. On a drive through the mountain community I could easily identify where old homes had been by the roses wrapped around woodpeckered fence posts or climbing up crumbling chimneys. The mining petered out in the 1870s. People left, old log homes collapsed, the roses stayed, surviving snow and droughts.

Perhaps my experience with old style roses is why I want to encourage these viburnums to thrive in spite of years of inappropriate care. I'm not in California any more, so I have to learn to care for what will grow here.

I'm not in California any more

Make that into a tee shirt and sell it