From the picture above, you can see how uneven the foliage is on this side of my hedge. Thus all the trouble I'm taking to shape my hedge, before it gets too old (the older a hedge gets, the harder it will be to shape).
All of this vegetation sticking out beyond my strings had to be removed. Keeping my shears as plumb as possible, and using my strings as guides, I proceeded to trim. When finished, I had a hedge with a straight edge. This is the easy part! It's getting the guides in place that takes the most work.
About half way along the hedge, you can see that there was an especially large indentation. That's because one particular boxwood shrub in my hedge, for whatever reason, didn't grow as fast in its first year as the others. It's because of this individual shrub that I had to remove as much vegetation as I removed in this project. Alas, as with people in a group, so it is with plants in a hedge: it seems that there's always one troublemaker!
In Step 9 we'll wrap up the trimming for this boxwood hedge project....
