Albert's Greenhouse

There's a plant beside my front walkway that has earned the nickname "that square pink bush" due to some plant torture which was implemented long before I moved in. It's an azalea, and it is covered completely in pink blooms in the spring. It's also been trimmed into a sort of oblong rectangular shape. The result is a pink, square object beside the walk for about a month in the spring. After the pink square stage comes the browning and wilted stage due to the fact that this bush holds its petals long after they have died, dried, and decayed. Nothing a thorough raking won't fix, but still a nuisance.

This spring, the bush displayed the results of a problem that I spent most of the summer ignoring. Instead of a green and pink box, it resembled a brown skeleton, with only a few green flowering twigs coming from the base. Most of the bush was dead, and I took a few hours on Sunday morning to 1) excavate the bush and re-plant the remenants and 2) fix the aforementioned and long ignored problem.

The problem in question was a leak in the lawn irrigation system, which left the azalea with wet feet for most of the summer previous. Azaleas, camelias and rhododendrons are all of the sort of acid-well drained-moderate climate school, which usually does well in my neighborhood when it's freed of the relatively dense clay soil that seems to be standard issue. The demise of the azalea was certainly a demonstration that you can't ignore everything you read in the Sunset Western Garden Book.

I was astonished to see another demonstration when I finally started digging up the azalea - why was the center dead and why were there still some perfectly healthy shoots coming from underneath the bush? Further inspection revealed that the green and healthy shoots were actually separate plants - the branches had rooted themselves.

I believe I saw this technique on TV at one point - basically taking a branch of a rhododendron and pinning it to the ground under the bush until it rooted, and then cutting it off. Whatever the cause, I now have two smallish azaleas in pots, and one medium sized azalea in the space that originally housed the now defunct plant.