Oh monstrous Mahonia,
what can I do with yer?
Your one stem gets higher
as each year you grow bigger.
I don’t know what to do with my Mahonia. It only has one stem, and therefore only one flower head. It is about four feet tall now and growing higher as I speak. It has lost all the lower leaves on its thick stem. I therefore feel it should be in the tree section rather than the shrub section of this blog!
It has actually flowered in November both years since I have had it, and it doubled its height both years. After flowering there are some green to purple berries where the flowers were. I live in hope that these will drop and form new little plants. In May it then sends up a new red coloured fountain at the centre of its lone stem. Weird or what!
Maybe I should have pruned it back after the landscapers planted it in 2014 to encourage sideshoots. However, I didn’t and it is now probably too late to do that. According to RHS:- ‘Charity’ is an upright evergreen shrub to 4m tall, with pinnate leaves composed of up to 21 lance-shaped leaflets, and small, cup-shaped yellow flowers borne in erect, clustered terminal racemes to 35cm long in late autumn and winter.
I looked on the mahonia.co.uk website for advice on how to prune it into a bush, but found nothing. However it did say that Mahonias that are in shade will grow taller looking for light. Well my Mahonia is in the shade of my ash tree, in front of the south-east wall and so does not get the sun until late afternoon. The website also says that Mahonias are best left unpruned. I tried to message the website for advice but for some reason it kept asking me to prove I was a human and give an answer to a maths formula, so I may have sent the message several times, or not at all! Watch this space to see if I get a reply.
My Garden Transformation 