Sickly Rosemary

Hey all

I have Rosemary bush that I pruned a few weeks ago and has never been quite right since. It's not as green as it was and the leaves look slightly crinkled, with little flecks of yellow and brown. It's obviously not in the best of health, so any clue as to what's going on?

 

Rosemary can be easily over watered. You're not keeping it too moist are you? On the other hand it does obviously need water like all plants do, so if it has been bone dry for too long it will complain.

How long has it been like that? At this time of year Rosemary starts to flower (if you're lucky enough to get plenty of warm sunshine). When it flowers, the leaves can look a bit badly for a while as all the energy goes into the flowers.

When you pruned it, did you cut away the old stems but leaving the young ones intact?

 

It began to look like that about two days after I pruned it. There wasn't any specific method to what I cut, it needed a tidy up, but I think I cut mainly the new stuff off.

 

Don't give up on it yet, but next time you feel the need to prune, here's some tips:

Follow a long stem up from the base, looking for young side shoots off it. Leave at least two of these young side shoots on, and cut the old 'parent' shoot off just above them, so that all the energy goes into the new side shoots.

Also, trim more out of the centre than the outsides. Rosemary loves sunshine, and the centre of the plant can get a bit shaded out by the outside shoots, causing them to eventually die off.

Keep your Rosemary in the sunniest position you can find. Don't water it too often, once a week during dry spells is plenty, and I never water mine at all during the winter or if it has rained in the last week. If you ever re-pot it or move it, give it very free draining soil, perhaps 2 parts compost to 1 part (by volume) grit sand, and have an inch or so of gravel in the bottom of its container.

The trick is to remember where it thrives best in nature. It does really in stony ground in the Mediterranean region. Here in Blighty we can't give it the mediterranean sunshine but we can simulate the long dry spells it gets in the med by giving it very free draining soil and hardly watering it, and we can make best use of our limited sunshine by placing it in a south facing aspect and making sure it doesn't get too dense with old growth.

I reckon for now though there is no cause for alarm, Rosemary is, in my experience, as tough as old boots.

Incidentally, there is a piece of folklore associated with Rosemary that reckons it does best in a household where the woman of the house is the one that wears the trousers

 

Plenty of good advice here.
I think part of the problem is that rosemary plants raised in commercial nurseries look so lush and dark green when you buy them. But as Clueless points out, the plant is really happiest growing on some sun-soaked hillside where it will actually look quite scruffy for most of the year.
Just give it time and as much sun as possible. Also a little feeding will help.