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A new neighbor stopped to ask what I was doing in my garden. She's a newlywed and a new homeowner. She told me she is feeling overwhelmed by the volume of plant material she now owns. I soon figured out which house she bought. It's a little cottage literally buried under rhododendrons. You can barely see the house from the street in that jungle of shrubs. I'm certain you can barely see out any of the windows, either. The place must have belonged to a rhody lover. It's jammed with plants. Most of them are very close to the foundations of the house. My new friend really does have a major job ahead if she wants to bring rational order to this landscape.
Her rhododendrons need to be pruned, thinned and generally brought back into the civilized world. June is a good month to begin this task. If you must prune a rhody, it is best to do so right after it flowers lest you cut off all of next year's buds. Prune now and you will still have color next spring.
Before you start to whack away at an overgrown rhody, you need to think about it a bit and ask yourself these key questions. First, do you really like this plant? Is it the right color? Is it infested with insect pests? Does it have plant diseases like powdery mildew? Is it possible to move it to a better location? Will reshaping it cure the problem?
If you don't like the plant, just get rid of it. Don't feel you must keep it. It's not a crime to remove a plant if the result is a better landscape picture. If the plant is not healthy, you may be wise to take it out and replace it with a cultivar that does not attract root weevils or mildew or whatever evil you are dealing with now. There are new varieties that are much more pest-resistant and, consequently, easier to grow and more attractive over the long run. Putting the right plant in the right place is at least half the battle.
Can you move it? Relocating a mature rhododendron, which is possible but not always easy. The root system on a rhody is a shallow woven mat of little rootlets. In sandy soil, you may be able to get the root ball out mostly intact, but this plant is one that should never dry out too much and the shock of moving a big plant is severe. This caution doesn't apply to a plant that comes from the nursery in a container or balled and burlapped-those plants have been prepared for the move and will suffer less than a recently dug specimen. I have successfully moved some pretty big shrubs by root pruning them in June to make the root ball more compact. This means driving a sharp shovel deeply into the ground in a circle around the plant, laying out the dimensions of the root ball you'll move. Give them time or so to form new tip roots, then move them in late winter. I made sure that I kept the transplants well watered in the summer and cut off the blooms for the year that I moved them. At first they sulked, but eventually they recovered.
If the plant is healthy, you like it and it's in a good place, you can deal with the "too big" issue in two ways. One is to prune out the lower branches and make a small tree of it then plant some groundcovers around its base. This is called "limbing up" and it works well on our native species as well as other varieties that grow tall but have enough starch in their limbs to stand by themselves. Things like pulmonarias, small spring bulbs and ajuga look wonderful underneath a rhododendron tree.
If your plant has a floppy growth habit, and some rhododendrons are definitely floppy, you are better off cutting it down to a better level. Reduce the overall height of an overgrown plant over a period of three to four years by pruning a quarter to a third of the old stems very severely. Don't take them all out-the plant must have leaves to live on. Keep the plant watered and feed it moderately after you have pruned. New growth should come from the severed stems and begin to make leaves. The following year, take out some more old stems and repeat until you have the plant growing strongly at a new, reduced height. This can give you back your windows.
Take a look at the growing conditions that made your plant get too leggy in
the first place. You may need to thin out a Douglas Fir or two to let in more
light. A rhody needs shade, but not too much. Tame your jungle, Tarzan, and
you will enjoy beautiful flowers in years to come.
Hortsense: Managing plant problems with Integrated Pest Management
