My question is, they are only a couple weeks old. some of the leaves are turning yellow and curling. A number of the stems do not have any leaves at all and look dead. I am sure that some of this is transport shock. Should I prune off the dead looking stems or let them go to get settled until early next spring and then prune.

My neighbor has the most beautiful burning bush that has been there for years but is covered from top to bottom is bright green leaves. That is the hope of what we can get with our shrubs so I want to make sure I care for them properly now.

I am really, really new to all of this and I appreciate your advice.

Thank you.

In any event, stick a finger into the rootball. Is it sopping or dry? Now you know what to do. Right?

The folks selling it confirmed it? Just out of curiosity, what state are you in?

tj

The question is, do they even have the slightest clue to start with? I hear this soooo many times, and most of the times it's when the plant actually is invasive.

I missed this the first time. Likely the proper phrase is 'the nursery stated erroneously they are not invasive in our area'.

At any rate, what Jean wrote and implied.

Dan

Oh, wow! You've followed the birds after eating the fruits and found no germination? How did you tag the birds and estimate defecation params? Have you published the results? (Or do you mean they've never flowered?)

Dan

Jean, the very first respondent, addressed what's probably the most likely cause of your problems. You did not answer the questions or respond. Without input from you, there's not much else to say except to discuss the likelihood of bad info from your nursery.

The only thing that didn't get addressed above was your concern about pruning out the dead/distressed branches. At this point, I would not prune them. Once a branch is completely dead, it can be safely pruned away, but pruning into live tissue will only further stress your shrubs.

Be careful about the landscape fabric. I have seen so many horror stories with that stuff in person and here on Gardenweb. It originally kills the grass underneath but does little to nothing to stop weeds and grass from growing down through the material and anchoring there. Landscape fabric covered by mulch is almost always a major disaster waiting to happen. People often end up paying me lots more money to do a job where they had landscape fabric down to start with. A layer of newspaper works much better and helps build the soil later on as it breaks down.

It is beautiful, but it is clearly taking over. This probably represents many years of unchecked multiplication. Now that they are exposed well to sun, it will probably get worse.

It takes a few years for the bushes to get mature and produce seed to be a pest. If you can prevent them from flowering, it will help. Before I removed my BB's, I used to cut them down from about 4-5' to this:

That took a lot of energy for the plant to re-grow and it would produce very few flowers.

I got tired of doing that and finally got rid of them in 2008. I am still finding seedlings. Every autumn I browse the woods that surround my property and look for seedlings to remove.