Recovering a Variegated Laurel

[Ross365]

In front of my house I have a fairly large Aucuba Japonica Variegata Spotted Laurel bushy evergreen shrub. In the 32 years I’ve been here, I’ve learned you have to very be light- handed in pruning it. The leaves are only at the end of the stalk; cut them too much and you only have stalk. My experience with such plants is that they are very slow to recover if over-pruned, especially around the lowest areas.

Long story short, I let someone else prune it and he has messed up badly (see picture; click on it to get and enlarged picture showing just how bad it is) cutting in back hard at the lower front and sides. I’d be surprised if it’s back to normal by the end of next summer.

I’m now doing my best to;
>Get the soil slowly up to a moist condition, considering how very dry it has been
>Breaking up the top 2-3 inches of soil to ensure water is taken in rather that running off the top and a bit of oxygen is getting in.
>Watering with cans containing a few grams of an 10-10-10 NPK fertiliser.

If anyone can offer me any better guidance on this, I’d be very appreciative.

 

[Alan Reynolds]

That’s odd. I have a couple of plain laurels and if I cut them back hard, they go bloody mad and will re sprout from whatever stump I leave. The next pruning will have to be with the chain saw.
They don’t seem to need a lot of moisture because the leaves are quite leathery.

 

[Ross365]

Yes, the plain laurels seem to be much tougher. As well as that Japonica, I have four other various variegated bushes, which all look nice when they are doing well, but two of them just progressively went plain green ( a silvery grey green) and don't look so good now. I've no idea why

 

[BrokenBiker]

My grandmother loved her garden used to have a bush very similar to that and when she got to the point she couldn't prune it herself through the dementia, we got a 'Gardner' in and he decimated it...took an age to get it back to how it should be but we found a mist attachment for the hose (we ended up using one designed for dogs) helped keep the moisture levels up in the dry weather. Seemed to work better than watering the ground when it was dry and hard although I have no idea what species it was, it looked similar