Garden Club

Last night the garden club met.  I'm not sure what purpose the club serves, and I am having a hard time staying interested in it.  The people I want to see are the ones in the garden bookgroup (Peggy, Jane, Cheryl, Betsy), so I see them already.  The other members I don't get any connection with, gardening or social.  The business meetings seem to be about nagging people to go weed the little garden strip on Loeffler Road.  They do arrange tours of gardens that I should take advantage of.

The group is all women my age, no men, no younger gardeners, and there doesn't seem to be much real plant knowledge.  They seem to have mostly perennial and flower gardens.

Anyway, Kevin Wilcox from Farmington Valley Nursery was there to talk about trees and shrubs, and although all of the plants his slideshow presented I already knew, I did learn the following:

When pruning a cut back shrub like Cotinus smokebush, or Lupulus golden hops vine, root prune it as well in early spring.  Otherwise, the roots get very large and store enough energy to fuel too much growth as it leafs out and it gets too big even in one season.

(Cut the new growth of the smokebush back a second time in spring when it has leafed out to about three or four feet high.  Cut the newly emerging rowth back by about a third then.)

So it was worthwhile after all.