Trees, Shrubs and Conifers: Advice on pruning/fixing my Viburnum shrub, 1 by kTalia

kTalia wrote:
Hi, I've only owned my own home for 3 years and I'm tackling educating myself on care of my trees and shrubs this year. All of them except my Viburnum I'm feeling pretty comfortable with. The past couple of years I've sort of given the Viburnum some bad haircuts not knowing what I was doing. Now they look like matted fur balls that my cat spit out! Oops.

There are a few different issues I'm dealing with. First of all, everything I've read says to only take out about 1/3 at a time. Well, I honestly don't think this is true for my Viburnum. I cut more than half off last year and the things tripled in size this year! So first off, is it going to be ok to take more like half out of these things? I want them to grow back next year to fit the size they currently are or even smaller.

So I started out by taking the matted mess out on the ground and in the middle of the bush, but because of my previous bad care, the bush has all these matted tangles mostly on the ends of the bush. So if I cut the branches back to the center, there won't be anything but straight sticks growing straight up left. Is that ok?? It's going to look very odd like that.

Last issue. Should I be focused on trying to make these low growing rounded shrubs in the future or keep the lower branches cut back and let the growth come from the top (more like a bushy tree)? They seem to want to grow straight up is why I'm asking.

I'm not sure what variety of Viburnum these shrubs are. My best guess is Trilobum, but I've never seen them grow fruit. So I'm not really sure. I do know that the flowers look like the Trilobum variety. Here are a few pictures as they look today.

Any advice would be appreciated.