What Happened to my Shrubs? Please Help Me
Hi all,
I know nothing about gardening, and this is why I am asking my questions in this forum. I moved into my house in December 2016. One of the reasons why we bought the house was because of the beautiful landscaping in the front, with tiered garden beds and beautifully planted shrubs, perennials, annuals, etc. Anyways I have attached three photos, one from May 2016 (house was owned by previous owners), one from last summer July 2017 (the first summer we spent at our house), and one from today May 2018.
1st pic May 2016 (under prior homeowners): As you can see from this photo, the shrubs on the right-hand side of our front garden bed looked full and pretty, and covered almost the entire right half of the bed.
2nd pic July 2017 (our first summer in the house): As you can see, it seems like the same shrubs grew back really small and wilted last year, resulting in our front garden bed looking very bare and ugly (sorry for the crappy pic, couldn't find a better one so hopefully you can still see what I'm talking about).
3rd pic May 2018 (today): Same shrubs continue to look tiny and wilted. Granted we had a very long winter and the weather only recently started to pick up, but if they are healthy shrubs, shouldn't they not look like this today??
Anyways here are my questions:
1) Can someone tell me the name of this shrub? I don't even know what plant this is.
2) Any idea what caused the shrubs to grow back so crappy last year?
3) Do you think these shrubs can ever grow back to the way they looked before?
I am trying to figure out whether to give these shrubs another chance again this year, or to just remove them entirely and plant something completely new. I don't really want to spend another summer in our house with a bare looking garden bed :(
Thank you.
Comments (10)
R T
5 years agoThank you for your response! I don't have any other photos of the shrub from when it was growing nicely before. The only thing I can do is attached a zoomed in photo of the one I posted above... not sure if this helps in identifying....
As to your other questions, I am located in South Toronto (Etobicoke).
In terms of what I did last summer, we employed the same gardener that the previous homeowners employed to take care of the garden (weeding, pruning, etc) every 2 weeks. Unfortunately, the gardener moved out of the country a few months ago so I am unable to ask him these questions (and I didn't realize that the shrubs grew back so badly last summer so I never even questioned him last year when he was still around).
There is irrigation on the property, we have sprinklers that come on 3x a week to water the garden beds.
As for the soil test, I have no idea. Since we had a gardener maintain the property, I figured he would have done something about the soil if it wasn't great... but I should definitely get a soil test done myself soon to make sure our soil is okay.
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Comments (5)It look more like a Sedum AKA Telephium to me than a shrub. However, more info is needed. Where are you in the world, what has weather, especially rain, been like, do you water/irrigate, how long has the plant been here, etc?...See MoreR T
5 years agoAlso, I don't think the previous homeowners planted these just for the home sale. In my original post I wrote that the first pic was from May 2016. Actually this is a mistake, the first photo was actually from May 2015. We bought the house in September 2016 (a year later), and the front garden bed was extremely beautiful when we went to see the house. So these shrubs (or perennials or whatever they may be) grew beautifully for at least two summers, under the previous homeowners' care (but obviously went to crap after we moved in... lol). Anyways I attached a couple photos I found from Google streetview dated Oct 2015 and June 2016 - the plants grew beautifully in both seasons.
Oct 2015:
June 2016:
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