Help with pruning a red robin

Hi,
Please could anyone help with pruning advice for our three year old red robin? It is becoming very sparse foliage wise at the bottom of the bush and just has woody branches with few leaves, whereas at the top it has lots of new red leaves but is quite spindly. What are we doing wrong? We planted it to screen a house at the bottom of our garden which is on higher ground than ours, so we do want it to be quite a tall bush, but we also wanted it to be " bushy" all over. Thank you for any help you can offer.

 

Hi,

Red robin are generally quiet robust growers, so yours does not sound too good .. ?

Can you post a photo of it and some details of its height/soil/aspect and what height you want it to cover.

 

Hi,
I'm really sorry but I'm struggling to attach photos so don't know if this will work. The plant is about 8 feet tall and is in quite a dry soil.
Many thanks for any advice.

 

Hi, have you given it a good mulch and a feed, and a few buckets of water? My red robin was sparse. It it seems to have improved I’m the past few years so don’t give up on it.

 

Hi,
Thanks for replying. No I haven't done either of those! ☹️ I'm a novice gardener and am not sure what or when I am supposed to do things to the plants. Sorry to ask, but what am I supposed to feed it?
Even tho it has quite a lot of bare wood at the bottom do you think it might regrow from those branches or is it too late now for them?

 

It doesn't look that bad to me!
Give it a hair cut but try to slant the pruning so it's wider at the bottom than the top, it'll give a bit more light to the base. In time it will fill out. I take it you'r not employing a compost bin in the garden, so a mulch of tea leaves, coffee grounds or a shop bought bag of compost will help replace nutrients in the soil. Some miracle grow plant food is a nice cheap quick fix

 

Thank you for your advice. The picture doesn't really show how thin the foliage is at the bottom. When you separate the leaves a bit all you can see is woody stems. I will start feeding it and give it a little prune as you suggest. I love that it hides the property behind us a bit, so I really hope it fills out.
Thanks again

 

Hi,

Agree with the others , its a fast grower so will always like plenty of water and a good feed with any general purpose fertiizer you can get hold of such as Growmore, Chicken Pellets etc.

You can prune Red Robin lightly or hard, those long shoots on top can be cut back to whatever height you want, and that will cause those branches to become more bushy.
It can be done at any time of year, though is less noticable in early spring just before the new growth starts.

Getting plenty of growth more down the base might be a bit harder as its already grown up against a young plant trained and clipped to be bushy.

If you were feeling brave you could cut the top off at about the height of the fence post and trim back all the lower branches by a half, so hopefully forcing it to put out plenty of low down new shoots.
Probably better to do it early spring, just as the new years growth is showing but it might work ok now, but its a bit of a risk either way.

Another option that we did with a RR in a similar position was to progressivley remove all the lower side shoots below the top of the fence level ( so it became like a pleached tree) and then grow some smaller atractive plants under it.


example of RR pleached, not ours.

 

Thank you everyone for your help and advice. I'm going to feed my RR and be as brave as I can with pruning and then I'll hope that it will respond well. Stay safe