Turning Hedges into “Bonsai” Trees

Going into winter, we have to start picking our projects carefully. Aside from the obvious autumn chores (like bringing in the garden ornaments, stacking wood, raking leaves, etc), we start categorizing our task list by ‘indoor tasks’ and ‘outdoor tasks’. Anything in the ‘outdoor task’ bucket gets priority, because this time of the year you never know when the last day of fall is. Anyone who has lived in this area (and probably Michigan in general) knows that weather is completely unpredictable! So for all we know, winter could be here tomorrow.

One big item on our to-do list for next year is to figure out our hedges. We’re either cutting them all out, or doing some serious pruning. They’re easily 40 years old and are just getting overgrown and hard to manage! The photo to the left is just a couple months after trimming them back, believe it or not…

So Dan decided to get a little creative… 🙂 Knowing that we could just cut them out if we didn’t like the results, Dan had free reign to go crazy. After a little research on topiary hedging, he started pruning. And pruning. And pruning!! Until, voila! Our very first ‘bonsai’ was formed. What do you think? Yay? Nay? We have all winter to think about it… 😉