Pruning elaeagnus shrubs

I am too old for Eleagnus.

There I have admitted it.

Do you all know this shrub?

Elaeagnus x Ebbingei.

(Gad, I have been spelling it incorrectly all along. Missing out that first a.) Mind you everyone seems to have been mis-attributing it all along. I found the information on a Czech website : https://www.havlis.cz/catalogue/elaeagnus-x-ebbingei-evergreen-silverthorn-tree

Evergreen silverthorn is a natural hybrid of e. macrophylla with large, evergreen, rather rounded leaves and vigorously growing e. pungens with narrower foliage and thorns. It is sometimes called Russian olive which is not correct as this name is already used for its deciduous sister e. angustifolia. It is described to have been discovered by a Dutch horticulturist Simon Doorenbos (1891-1980) who named it after another Dutch botanist J.W.E. Ebbinge in 1929. However, many years later it was pointed out that a Swiss botanist Camille Servettaz (1870-1947) found this mutation, too, and named it elaeagnus x submacrophylla already in 1909. In spite of that, the whole horticultural world still sticks to e. x ebbingei.

It’s a brute. You can plant it as part of a mixed hedge – and it will thug its way among the other more delicate shrubs. And yes you get these strange sharp fruits in spring – probably the cure for Vitamin C deficiency if you don’t mind stripping the enamel off your teeth from the astringent taste. Drupes not fruit. (I’m going down a wormhole of information.) And a lovely perfume in autumn.

But I garden on terraces and slopes. I planted two in the mixed hedge near the potting shed. They are fine and staying put.

One here in the middle of the barn garden, and two more beside a path leading through the shade garden.

I was lured to them after reading a design book about Nicole de Vésian. She was a fashion designer turned garden magician who created many gardens around the Luberon further south.

You might recall images of her garden at La Louve.

She was the one who started that trend of squaring off the tops of cypress trees. Not because she loved them square, but actually because she bought off job lot of the plants that had been burned by frost. And everyone went mad for the scheme.

I do not lop the top off my trees. (I just accidentally crop them out of photos.)

But I do recall being enchanted by a description of her love of the felty brown undersides of the Eleagnus shrub. Sorry, Elaeagnus shrub.

And I duly invested. They grow vigorously.

And it came to me that I am no longer able to leap up and prune the tops.

This is me at full stretch doing a prune.

I stood looking down on the shrubs to see who much had to go.

Half-tamed.

It is growing beyond a comfortable height and girth. And I can see that it is now out of all proportion to the other better behaved shrubs around. (Well, that rosemary had a severe pruning after I saw this shot the day after I took the picture.)

I did toy with the idea of a really hard prune to get it down to knee height. To start again if you like.

After all, I put in a lot of effort a few years ago to shape it. This shrub consumes secateur time.

Crown lifting an established shrub

So with secateurs and a quiet afternoon I started to prune.

And prune and prune.

Branches turning back in on themselves, thick trunks, sharp edges everywhere… ouch.

(if I had done my research I would also have discovered it is also called Silverthorn.)

From one side it almost looked ‘okay’. A bit squared off. But in proportion now.

But from the back – a disaster. I could of course have been more patient and just waited it out.

In a few months this manky side would have started back into growth.

But this is in a main part of the garden en route to the potting shed. It was like staring at the results of a bad do-it-yourself haircut every day.

So.

Reader I took a chain saw to the problem.

Gone.

And for good measure I took out two more shrubs that were meant to be edging plants on a path in the shade garden. But had so overwhelmed the space I couldn’t even squeeze past. And if not now it was only going to get worse.

That is a shrub in an untamed state.

And tricky to really get at the base to prune as it’s a yoga defying crouch on rocks to get in. Besides, I found two birds nests close by, so I don’t want to mess about too much here in the shrubbery.

Naturally the elephant in the room is staring above me in this part of the garden.

There is a dying back chestnut tree crowding all the light from any of my shrubs below. About fifty feet of tree.

So maybe the mighty eleagnus is just showing it won’t be deterred by lack of light and space.

This autumn I need to hire a tree surgeon to safely bring down those two monstrous trunks.

With David wielding the chain saw on the shrubs I also asked him to cut down the ‘suckers’ coming from the base of this huge chestnut.

I have about a day of clearing up from the spiky eleagnus mess. So why not add more?

And what a reveal. You can now glimpse the potting shed through the tees.

You see shed. I see a mighty pile of prunings to collect up and compost.

It starts with one shrub that needs a hard prune and ends up with a chain sawing fest of four. And a day goes by in a whirr of noise and destruction.

But farewell wrong plant wrong place. You are just too vigorous for me.