Their ok now for the size they are, but thoose lower branches will not be desirable as the trees grow. You’ll want the remove the horizontal branchs that are below head height at sometime in the future. Be frugal with the triming at this point.
Well, I was thinking of removing the little offshoots like the one here and some of the lower little branches that are running under higher ones. I don’t mind waiting until winter if my landlady doesn’t.
Since you guys were so good with the trees, can you tell me if this actually is a blackberry bush?
You can remove those little offshoots and suckers anytime. Just dip your clippers in a 10% solution of bleach beforehand and again before you move on to another tree.
I’d say that grass does need a little work 
To get good at gardening require expirencem and doing a small bit of pruning will give you an idea of a tree responds. The lower branchs were not cut earlier when it sould have been done. The lower branches are a large percentage of the tree’s mass at this time. I wouldn’t suggest you cut off any of the large bottom ones at this point. I would cut them if they were mine, but they wouldn’t have ever gotten that bad. I takes years to prune and shape a tree like that, and it will look ugly when the lower limbs can come off. Being that it’s rentl property, I wouldn’t do the drastiac prunning of the large lower branches. Cut of branches that rub and some of the suckers.
The plants in the picture are not blackberries or any of it’s relatives. I have an idea of what they may be, but my brain is shutting down right now. The pictures don’t have good enough resolution to identify the flowers structure.
Your “blackberries” are lantana, I’m fairly sure.
Is this it? If it is, just cut away the dead stuff. That’s a well known xeriscape plant, which means it is native, drought tolerant and it also happens to be attractive to butterflies. You should never have to feed it or water it or do much of anything except cut the dead stuff away every spring. If you ever get frost, it may get zapped some years, but will come right back. Yes, it does make weird little black berries, which birds will eat and then poop grapestains on your car. I consider it a “weed” because it’s pretty darn bulletproof and hard to kill. What you have there is a lovely, blooming, maintenence-free plant that is designed for your climate. Enjoy.
Yeah, that’s the stuff.
Thanks for all the help guys. If I can’t dissolve it in chloroform and shove it in an NMR, I’m clueless about identifiying something.
Oh, oh! Featherlou! My lilacs are quite old and haven’t been flowering much. I bought the house from the estate of a dead 99 year old woman, so you can imagine she wasn’t doing much gardening. They need prunig - how and when should I do this? Do they need fertilizer? Also, this year my peonies didn’t bloom. The plants came up and looked vigorous, but no blooms. What happened? I had blooms last year.
StG
I’m not **Featherlou[b/], but if I may butt in …
Lilacs bloom on wood they grow this year. It’s a little late to prune this season – you ordinarily do it right after they bloom – but if your bloom wasn’t impressive this year, what the hell, do it now.
That “do a third at a time” advice given upthread is good – take out the oldest, woodiest looking stems from the ground. If you need to shape the top section a little, you can do that as well, but never take out more than a third of the bush overall.
Peonies – dunno. Are they getting enough sun?
Lantana was what I was thinking, but my google foo was off tonight. I couldn’t get a picture for the life of me.
twicks - The lilacs are far taller than I am, so I can really only do so much cutting, unless I cut way back. If I did that, would it hurt the bushes? By the looks of them, they’re pretty old.
THe peonies are in a relatively shady location. Maybe I should move the roots once they die back and put some hydrangeas in their spot. I love hydrangeas. One of my neighbors told me last week that after old Miss Mattie (the woman who owned the house) died, a bunch of the people on our road helped themselves to big clumps of peony from her garden, leaving me with two clumps in the shade.
StG
As long as you don’t cut back more than a third of the bush, overall, in any one year, you probably won’t kill it. Probably. 
(Sorry – I really am kidding. You should be fine.) It really kind of depends what you want to do with it, how you want to prune it. Me, I’ve got a tiny garden, with my lilac tucked into a corner – I’m in the process of cutting out most of the lower stuff (to give me room to plant beneath it), and treating it almost more like a tree, with bare branches for the lbottom four or five feet. That way I get the week of intoxicating bloom each spring, but it’s not taking up too much space the other 51 weeks. I’m keeping it fairly low overall – maybe nine or ten feet – so I can get up on a ladder and deadhead it each spring, which gives me better bloom.
If you’ve got one of those big, full, happy lilacs – cut off the dead-looking stuff and leave it at that. I think it’s cool seeing one that big. If it’s reasonably full but taller than you like, give it a crewcut – cut it down and shape it to the height you’d prefer. As I said before, you might lose some bloom next season, but you won’t kill it, as long as you don’t take off more than about a third of the total mass. If it’s straggly looking, start a three-year plan of cutting out about a third of the stuff, from the roots, each year.
On the peonies – they do like a lot of sun, so you’d probably be better off moving them. Keep in mind that peonies hate being moved. I’d always heard it was damn close to impossible, but a woman whose garden I used to pass on my daily walk moved some quite successfully – she did it in the fall, and rather than moving a clump of roots-and-dirt, which is the usual way to move plants, she dug up the roots and shook off as much dirt as possible, and moved them bare-root. I’ve got three plants that just aren’t getting enough sun, and I’m going to try that this fall. Note that I haven’t done this myself, but I have seen it done successfully.
I just moved some peonies. They don’t bloom unless they recieve a lot of sun. The root mass needs to get to a critical mass size to bloom decent, so the larger the clump moved, the sooner they’ll bloom. You should dig around the clumps to about two feet deep, and slid the shovel under the root mass to loosen it. A mlarge clump can be divided up into 1&1/2 to 2 foot pieces and give you a clump that will likely bloom the next year. They also do best in organic rich soil, not absolutely required though. Wait until they go dormant this year or next spring before they sprout. They have to have good drainage, Don’t plant them where the water gathers.
Harmonious Discord – did you move with the dirt or without? I’m wondering about this bare-root thing the woman was telling me about.
I got them from another location. I set them on a garbage bagand pulled the side up and over the root ball. I tried the bag at the top to keep it from breaking apart. I wash the dirt off the roots at home with a slow water stream, to seperate the root pieces, being careful not to break the roots that were connected together. It let me sort the roots by size and get all the grass and weeds out of the clump. It was comepletely dorment at the time, so washing off the roots didn’t do any damage. Don’t do the root only bit if it isn’t domant. Don’t let the roots dry out, or bake in the sun. I moved it in the soil because I wasn’t sure it was completely dormant, this spring when I got the plants. The soil in the bags kept them from drying out for a couple days until I could replant them.
I have always dug up my peonies, roots and all, and moved them without any problems. The ones that have been relocated came back the next year. Even after being divided. They were slower than the rest, but I did everything in the fall after everything goes dormant
YMMV.
What peonies really hate is being weed wacked. Took two years after a sound and unmerciful thrashing by my husband and his quest to tame the weeds for that peony to come back.
Thanks for the info, gang.
Now I’ve just got to figure out a spot that will get enough sun…