Newbie here so this is probably a silly question. What kind of shrubs are these? They look exactly the same in the picture but different in person. We want to cut them way back as they are severely overgrown but are concerned they won't recover. Please help me ID them so we can decide what to do. Thanks! Pics 1 and 2 are of one shrub, 3 and 4 are of the other:
They both look like some variety of Juniperus chinensis, possibly 'fitzeriana'. You need to be careful cutting them back. If you cut all of the foliage off a branch, that branch will die. If you leave some foliage on each branch, they will back-bud with lots of new growth. It's best to prune them in late-winter to early spring, when the plants are dormant.
Thank you for the quick replies. We don't want to have to completely remove these juniper plants for one part because of the enormous job it would be to get the roots etc completely removed, but they are so overgrown. The branches we already took off were overgrown into a neighbours yard so we had to take them right off. I didn't know that about leaving foliage but for what i took off i didn't really have a choice regardless. Will these plants continue to grow right into winter or have they done all the growing they are going to do for this year? The largest of the two is so over grown it is about a foot past the border surrounding the front window, which we plan on painting soon. I was looking at the shrub earlier and if we took it down a good foot, even just low enough so we could paint, it would be into the brown/dead area of the plant. If it will continue to grow this year, what if i took off a bunch of growth leaving just a bit of green and continued to do that until it stops producing new green growth and then did some more next year, or does it produce new growth very slowly? I would be willing to wait to paint until next year if it means saving this plant and regaining some control of it. Sorry for a million questions and such a lengthy post.
It's a little late in the season to be getting any new growth. Most Junipers are fairly slow growing. It probably doesn't grow more than about 3 or 4 inches a year. What you might want to do is just thin it out. You can selectively remove branches, just as long as the branches you leave still have foliage on them. I can't tell you how many times I've seen someone try to prune these into a hedge, and end up big dead areas where they pruned all the foliage off the branches. You can do that with a boxwood, and it will just put out new buds, but Junipers very rarely produce new buds on branches that have had all the foliage removed. Usually you just end up with a mass of dead branches. On the other hand, if you constantly trim just the tips of your juniper, it will respond by producing many more branches. I've seen some Junipers that were pruned this way, and they look like a huge, green ball.
