Marketanpuisto, part deux

Myself, Mr Thumb and younger daughter S went to Marketanpuisto together. Everybody played Pokémon Go, and I and Mr Thumb admired plants.

Bonsai birches!

This looks just really great, the rhythm is good and somehow the plants showcase each other. 

I'm thinking of filling the sunny side of the fence with peonies in the future. These were awesome.

Grey alder with tufty leaves (alnus incana f. angustissima, hapsuharmaaleppä). Love it!

This just looks really good. Much better in real life than in the pic :/

Awkward growths

And while we're on the subject of fails... I'm not sure that this really is one, and in any case it's not mine \o/  :D but something needs to happen with that crabapple tree. The way the tree has been pruned has the tree full of awkward angles and tangles.

Yes, one branch is supporting the other while passing over and under itself.

The tree is also full of dead twigs, even quite large ones, as you can see.

Too late to do anything about it before next spring (although I did cut off some really annoying and ugly dangly things), but I'm thinking quite a lot of it needs to come off.

EDIT: Madam Guru pointed out that my information was in error and that it is, in fact, okay to prune the crabapple in late summer. Yay! Pics will be coming up soon, no doubt.

Just... no.

Remember the explosion of a flowerbed full of alchemilla and phlox that looked like this in the not-too-distant past?

Well, after some growth and some heavy rain it turned into a very laid-back explosion.

The alchemilla flowers got tired and decided to lie down, bringing the geraniums and phlox down (for a change). Gaah. The stalks showed no sign of resuming an upright posture even when dry(ish) and were basically getting  smushed against the ground.

As I'm using the past tense you'll have guessed that I took action by removing the heaviest alchemilla flowers - I started out by cutting them all off, then realised it was too much and changed my strategy to thinning, but that wasn't much better, just the worst of both worlds.

The flowerbed now looks like a particularly shoddy explosion that someone half-heartedly tried to tidy up but made it worse.

What should I do? Cut everything off? Cut some things off? Dig the bloody thing up and plant boring but well-behaved bushes?