There were a lot of rhododendrons when we moved into this house, and honestly I don’t know much about them. Now that spring is here, I took a walk around the house to look at them and figure out what needs to be done.

The first one is a taller tree, 6-7′, that looks nice from one side

but you can see it’s all leggy and doesn’t have a lot of leaves from the other. Actually, it may even be 2-3 plants, spaced closely together, and none of them seem to be doing any new growth from the base.

I’m going to leave these ones as they are though, because my daughter loves to play on the bottom. It does need some work for general health, because it seems to have some sort of fungal problem on the leaves. I’ll wait until its new pink blossoms fade and then I’ll do a bit of tender care. I don’t know any of the history of these shrubs as we just moved in here …. so all I have to go on is the current state of the plant and any evidence of past trauma or pruning.

In the front yard, I have 4 of them. Two seem to be getting enough sunshine, have a nice shape to them, and look like they needed to be deadheaded but will otherwise produce some nice magenta flowers this season.

The other two are some leggy variety, need some serious help, or they are not getting enough sun from being under a large conifer tree. It looks like they both did have some heavy pruning down to the base at some point and did not regrow from it, so I’m not sure if a rejuventation pruning would even work in this case. I may just have to accept how sparse they are.

And then there is this one in the back yard, which sits in the shade of a maple tree. It seems to have done some base regrowth after a pruning, so I may have some luck in helping this one to come back a bit stronger.

There you have it—7 or 8 in all!