Something I haven’t figured out is how to keep abelia trimmed down and have it look good. We have two big bushes of it that I would like to be just a couple feet shorter. One in particular is under a window. Or at least I would like for it to be under the window. As it is it obscures the window.

Some people try to clip these into a square hedge but that just does not look right to my eye. The plant has many stems that come up from the ground and fall over in a kind of fountain effect. If you cut the stem anywhere it branches from that point, spoiling the effect.

At one office where I use to work, the parking lot was surrounded by a hedge of this type that got too big. One day the groundskeepers came out and whacked everything down at ground level. They looked terrible for a while but grew back in looking just perfect.

I wish that I had thought of doing that in the winter. This late in the year I am afraid I might be looking at another whole year before they looked good again. Abelia is evergreen so one hesitates to cut it in the winter when not much else is looking good.

What I did instead today is crawl around under the bush trying to identify the longest stems and whacking them off at ground level. That method helped a little, but truthfully all the stems are too tall. I also made sure that I got the stems with branches that scraped against the windowglass in a breeze making my skin crawl the way it did when kids used to scrape their fingernails on the blackboard (remember that?).