Maybe It's Time To Have a Second Look At Your Procumbens Juniper

By  Thomas J.

This months article is somewhat of a continuation of the December 2005 article, where I address the problem of the procumbens juniper becoming too overgrown, and in desperate need of some thinning out, and possibly some branch prunning also. These junipers can be fun to work with, but require a lot of time to keep them looking really good. One or two might not be so bad, but if you have seven or eight of them, plus an assortment of deciduous type trees, your going to be spending a lot of time pinching if you want to keep them in show condition, especially if you want to keep the mature type foliage, which is the most desirable. Something like the picture on the left. The picture on the right is the more typical juvenile type foliage more commonly seen on these junipers.

Maybe it's time to have a second look at your procumbens junipers.

This next picture below shows how one of these junipers can get overgrown in a hurry. It's not so bad, that it has completely lost its shape, but it needs some fine tuning to make it more pleasing
to the eye.

After spending some time with the tree, it doesn't take long to bring it back to something more acceptable. One of the main things here was to open it up to expose more of the trunk.

While I was at it, I considered changing the pot also, in order to try and bring new life into something old. Although I did like the round pot, it seemed a bit too big for the thin trunk. With the wide spread of the basic outline of the tree, I couldn't go too small either. I had to find that happy medium so to speak.

This next picture shows another one of my procumbens before any styling work was done to it.

After some continuous work on the tree for about eighteen months, I finally was able to get t into a half way decent pot, which was a miracle in itself since there is hardly any root structure to support the tree up.
But then I had to decide which part of the tree would be my front. One of those decisions where both sides could be used, but in all reality, just one real front.

At first I thought this would be my front.

But later decided to use what was then the back side of the tree.

But again, after doing some much needed clean up on the foliage, and taking a second look to see if there was anything else I could to improve the looks of the tree, I went ahead and stripped the foliage and jinned the branches with lime sulphur, on the lower most branches. Now I believe those branches which have been jinned, play a better role in the overall design of the tree.

Take a second look and see just how much more you might be able to improve your procumbens juniper.