Help, please: How to straighten out Carol Mackie Daphne?

(Please note I'm also posting this in "Ask a Gardener.")

I have a lovely daphne that is I think unusual in that it has a little "trunk." It has been growing beautifully for years; however, it's on a bit of a tilt. (Mea culpa, must have planted it crooked.) So now I'm trying to determine how to get it to straighten up and fly right and be as stable as possible.

I'm attaching a photo of the daphne in bloom. To view the details you can go to my flickr album at: www.flicker.com - then add to the address the following: /photos/63293343@N08/sets/72157626789938036/

(Re the above: I tried to type in the link, but it doesn't show up as the whole thing. But I'll try again here and it might take you straight to the link (I'm a newbie. Sorry.): http://www.flickr.com/photos/63293343@N08/5751815569/in/set-72157626789938036/

Now that bloom time is over, I want to do something to correct this problem. Any suggestions? My thoughts have been (a) to do a better (tauter) job at staking it, (b) trying to dig under the roots on the high side and straighten it out from the roots - although I've heard daphnes don't like transplanting and this step would involve disturbing the roots, (c) just prune it so it's heavier on the high side and hope it rights itself, and (d) a combo of the above.

I'm also wondering if I should put more soil around it at the bottom, because I'm not sure that much of the curly root tops should be exposed.

Thanks in advance for any wisdom you can toss my way!

I would get rid of the cables you have on it--if it's been in the ground for years its roots are holding it pretty firmly in position so that's not going to straighten it out.

Looking at the last picture in your Flickr album, it appears to me that the one side of the plant may be more shaded than the other. Plants will naturally grow more in the direction where they get more sun, so it's always going to tend to grow more on that side no matter what you do (unless you remove the tree that's shading it of course).

You can try a bit of judicious pruning to even things up, but I wouldn't do anything besides that. The plant is not lopsided because it's top-heavy though so don't expect pruning to make it straighter. You can even things up so that branches are more evenly distributed and same height on the various sides...caveat being that the side that gets more light is always going to grow better.

Thanks for the advice, ecrane. What a relief that I don't have to mess with the roots and I can take those horrible cables off. As for the pruning, I've been cruising the web to find advice and quite a few people say you can prune it hard. Does that advice sound good to you? I guess I'll have to find that pruning book so I can learn just where to cut and don't make any mistakes!

I don't know if daphnes do well with hard pruning or not, but I don't see why you'd need to do that even if you could--all that'll do is take the shrub down to nothing, and then it'll gradually grow back to looking like it does now but you'll have an awkward phase in between where it doesn't look as good. So unless you feel the entire shrub is overgrown and you'd like to start over from scratch I wouldn't hard prune.

If you don't like it being lopsided, the best thing to do is selectively prune out some branches from the heavier side to make it look more even but leave the rest of it alone. Make sure to step back and look at the shrub from a distance frequently as you do this, that'll give you the best sense of which branches to remove. Since the side that gets more light is always going to tend to grow better, you'll probably have to repeat this selective pruning from time to time.

ecrane, I appreciate your thoughts. I'm always barging in without stepping back, so I'll definitely take that advice to heart. I've never pruned this daphne, so it'll be interesting to see how the growth comes out next year!

Hmm. I'm editing this comment to see if I can close the thread. Don't see any way to do it, but it is closed...

This message was edited Jun 3, 2011 10:52 PM