Taking Stock Getting Ready For Summer

Most of your shrubs should be full of swelling buds. The lilacs will already have their first leaves peeking through. Physocarpus species (ninebarks) and hydrangeas will always be slower, a few weeks behind the rest.

With the exception of those early flowering shrubs like lilacs, final pruning should be done as soon as possible (if you did not do it in the fall). Generally speaking, remove the upper third of the shrub with a good clean cut just above a budding node. Finally, look for branches that seem to be dead with no sign of buds especially on spirea, euonymus (Burning Bush), as well as the ninebark family. This is not likely to be "winter kill," but rather the activity of rodents during the winter. They chew away the outer bark, effectively girdling the stems from ground level up to about 12 inches.This damage is not easy to prevent as much of the activity takes place under the snow line. In most cases, those branches will not recover, and need to be cut down to ground level. The plant itself will rejuvenate from the base, but you have lost the structure of the plant for the season. Happy summer growing!

Now is a good time of the year to take a close look round the yard and make your plans for the coming growing season. How have your plants survived the winter? What maintenance work should you be doing now?

If you are like me, I tend to leave all my perennials intact in the fall without cutting back to the ground. Now would be the time to remove the old debris.I tend to mulch heavily in early

winter for the insulation benefit in order to help keep the plant's roots at an even temperature during the winter.A lot of it will rake away; some of it can be cut with a pair of hedge shears. Removing some of the mulch now will aid in warming up the soil, which is what is needed in order to get those roots growing again.

Some perennials have begun to make their appearance: Sedum varieties were amongst the first to announce their intentions to pull out of dormancy. If they have gone 3 or 4 years without splitting, the month of May would be a good time to do that mainly because you have much less foliage to deal with, and the cooler temperatures mean less stress on the new plants. Asters and achillea species will have likely multiplied dramatically and need to be split for new plantings or discarded to control their rampant spreading.

Apart from polemonium species (Jacob's Ladder), none of the shade perennials have poked through yet. This is normal. The shaded areas take longer for the soil to warm up. A word of warning on splitting hostas: before you start cutting into them, do an Internet search on

Hosta Virus X, a fairly new virus that could potentially ruin your hosta collection. The virus is transmitted by the sap of an infected plant being in contact with the sap of a healthy plant for example, when you cut into them for splits.