is that dirt in the pot ... if so.. i would just choose a new spot and plant it in the ground ... dirt in pots is not a good long term potting media ...

and i would let it get over 2 transplant stresses ... before slathering on ferts and what not ...

and since you totally disturbed the root mass .. i would not go cutting off its canopy in any major way ...

if you can appreciate it as a multi year recovery project.. good ...

if its going to bug the heck out of you.. just get rid of it.. lifes too short to be irritated by garden plants ....

there are always those few plants.. that never end up performing.. for whatever reason ... get rid of them if need be ...

ken

This shrub is extremely amenable to pruning, even very hard pruning, but seldom requires it. I would not do so until it has re-estabished in its new location. But you are right - it is pretty puny for V. davidii in our climate and the leaves should be a deep, dark green. Something in its previous location was not making it happy. And while it can easily take full sun, I believe it looks better and with better color in a least a partially shaded location.

When I was going to hort school, this was one of several shrubs referred to as "McDonald's plants" because of their inclusion in all manner of commercial landscape settings.....parking lots included. This is the Timex of the PNW BLE plant world........it takes a licking and keeps on ticking!!

Alright, I will move it to another spot and wait til next year to prune a bit. I didn’t know it was bad to prune at the same time as transplanting, but that makes sense. I will try to post on the shrubs forum but I’m not sure I understand what you mean by gardenweb interface. Just post and only tag “shrubs”?

Since you've had your question answered, no need to repost :-) But in future, just pick ONE of the gardening forums and post there....whichever one you feel most appropriate. The multiple tagging on what used to be the GardenWeb forums - all the gardening forums - doesn't work. Except for Landscape Design.......that seems to be the only GW forum that accepts the Houzz multi-tagging.

(long and involved story but GardenWeb was around long before Houzz was a glimmer in anyone's eye and the melding of the two websites since the acquisition has not gone without numerous glitches, this tagging thing still being one of the major ones. It doesn't work and it is just plain dumb anyway)

I'm seeing it on the shrubs forum.

Soil looks too heavy for container use, as dirt out of the ground often is. So plant could be yellow from being too wet. Otherwise it definitely needs to be fertilized. After you get it to green up just let it fill out and normalize on its own - cutting back this already slow growing kind of shrub will just add time to how long you have to wait for it to make a bigger, more symmetric top.

Oh it’s just in the pot temporarily because I needed to move it out of the way. The roots were really shallow which I guess tells me that it didn’t like the dirt that was under it and/or I wasn’t watering it deeply probably. I’m learning!

Mexican orange to the right of it has poor color also. When you dig there does the soil seem dank smelling and heavy textured?

I just bought that Mexican orange so it’s sitting there in a pot. I’m thinking to return it because it doesn’t look that healthy (it was the last 2 left). I seem to be having bad luck with shrubs right now.

But to answer your question about the soil, its hard for me to describe. It’s got a couple inches of ok soil (from trying to amend the beds with Tagro & mulch) and then underneath it is much lighter colored sandy dirt. I’ve been trying to be better at digger bigger holes for my plants and heavily amending with compost and starter fertilizer (EB Stone Sure Start).

Sandy means there shouldn't be a rotting problem but there could be infertility. Otherwise plants are probably having difficulties due to all that amending you are doing - do not mix a bunch of stuff into individual planting holes for long term plants. Instead plant your shrubs etc. into loosened existing soil, then put the amendments on top afterward - as mulch.

Yes, take the Mexican orange back - it looks terrible.

Yikes, that’s what they always tell me at the garden shop “here, buy a bag of this and put a couple shovels of it in the planting hole”.

In my garden, if I am planting in an area where nothing currently grows, I sometimes amend the entire bed and turn in manure to add organic matter to the top several inches of my sandy soil and then do any loosening needed below that. Any further amendments I add to the top or if I am planting in an already existing bed with established plantings, I just loosen soil in as wide an area as possible and then plant and amend on the surface as Embo said. Amending just the planting hole tends to create problems with water movement between the planting hole and the surrounding soil, and sometimes leads to circling roots in the hole.