Tree & Shrub Care

Woody plants run on a different calendar than turf and they fail differently. A shrub does not go thin, it declines, and by the time the foliage tells you, the problem has usually been in the root zone or under the bark for a season or two.

Feeding goes in below the mulch, into the top eight to twelve inches where the feeder roots actually are, out toward the drip line rather than up against the trunk. Fertilizer broadcast on top of mulch mostly feeds the mulch. Bed pH matters more here than it does on turf, and it cuts both ways: azalea, camellia, blueberry and holly want acid soil down in the low fives, while boxwood is happiest near neutral. The same lime that fixes your lawn can hurt the bed it borders, so the two get managed separately.

Pruning is a timing question before it is a technique question. Spring bloomers (azalea, forsythia, bigleaf hydrangea, loropetalum) set next year’s buds within a few weeks of finishing, so they get pruned right after they bloom or they do not get pruned that year. Summer bloomers and most evergreens go in late winter while they are dormant. Crape myrtle gets thinned and headed back to a bud, not cut off at shoulder height; topping produces a flush of weak water sprouts and a permanently knuckled trunk that never comes back.

On the pest side, what we see here is fairly predictable: lace bug on azalea, scale on camellia and holly, spider mites on anything hot and dusty, aphids and whitefly on new growth, borers on trees already under stress. Most of it is handled with a dormant horticultural oil for the overwintering stages plus a targeted treatment during the crawler window, which is a couple of weeks and not a season. Scouting is the whole game: a product applied after the crawlers have settled in under their armor is money spent on nothing.

What is included

• Deep-root feeding into the feeder-root zone at the drip line, not broadcast over mulch
• Bed pH managed separately from the lawn: acid-loving shrubs and turf want different numbers
• Pruning timed to bloom habit, so spring bloomers keep next year’s buds
• Dormant horticultural oil for overwintering scale and mite stages
• Crawler-timed treatment for scale, lace bug, aphids and spider mites
• Thinning cuts on crape myrtle, no topping

Serving your area

We run tree & shrub care across Northwest Georgia and East Alabama out of our Rome office, on the same clay and the same climate everywhere on this list, so the timing that works on one of these lawns works on the next one.