Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. There’s nothing easier than having a landscape company come in and install a complete and mature-looking yard – well, you do have to pay the bill. The real work comes in keeping those plants placed way too close together healthy as they reach their mature size. I bought two dozen two-dollar boxwood babies to put across the front of our house thirty-three years ago. Fortunately, I killed half of them with too much fertilizer, and yes, this is after I had my horticulture degree. So now the twelve survivors have finally gotten so big that I need to do a second major pruning, last tackled six years ago. I have never sheared them – using electric tools to shape them into green meat balls – and that’s probably why they’re still healthy as each plant is relatively open to sunlight and air movement.