Nate Nagel wrote:
Hi all,

hoping for advice from someone with a green thumb here... friend of
mine has a house that was vacant for a while before he bought it so
all the landscaping went to heck. One thing that still looks
promising is some thick hedges between his driveway and his
neighbor's driveway. I suspect that they are English boxwood but am
not knowledgeable enough to say for sure.) Unfortunately, there were
all sorts of weeds and such growing right up through them and choking
them. Last fall he and I did some serious weeding in there and
literally removed a truckload of undesirable plant matter as well as
dead branches from the area, then hit it again in the early spring,
yielding much less mess. Unfortunately, both times I broke out with
what I believe now is a rash caused by some nasty viney stuff...
doesn't look like the poison ivy I'm familiar with but now that it's
late spring I can see it coming back again and this time the new
leaves are shiny making me hesitant to touch it. There's some other
stuff coming up in there as well that shouldn't be there. The good
news is that after all that work, the hedges themselves are filling
in nicely and I think after a couple years of letting them grow and
shaping them they will be back to their former glory. Now that it's
lawn-mowing season I've also been encouraging him to toss his grass
clippings under there to keep down any non-established weeds, but
apparently there's a few that we couldn't kill by pulling/digging
that keep coming back.
So the question. Now that we've done the heavy lifting, is there any
kind of herbicide that I could use that won't kill the boxwoods? I've
tried to pull everything that I could but apparently there are some
weeds with long-established, deep roots that might best be killed by
other methods.

Oddly, I've searched and found others asking similar questions, but
not getting any definitive answers. Is that because what I'm looking
for doesn't exist?


I had some luck with blackberry in a laurel hedge using Roundup, by putting the
roundup (somewhat concentrated) into a flower tube (like a test tube) over the
cut end of the vine, and taping it in place with the vine bent to come into the
top so the liquid would stay put. Apparently, enough roundup was drawn back into
the plant to kill it.

If the vines grow faster than the hedge, you can use cardboard as a shield to
spray the vine and protect the hedge. The point would be to only get the roundup
on the "weed".