I ordinarily don't care for photinia...usually clipped into 'square boxes'....boooring.
But I always marvel at this hedge..every time I pass it. If we do another house, I will try to find a way to work in a large hedge of this. Of course, I think it would look best with a white cottage, but.....
It's so frou-frou, frilly, feminine, floriferous with gay abandon.
These are never pruned, doubt if they ever have been...easily 12 x 12 ft. Probably more. The pic does not capture the subtle overall coloring that I favor...reddish / pink / beige....

Here's a funny story: My parents named my oldest sister Svetlana, but that's a pagan name (goddess of light), so she was baptized Photinia.

The Orthodox Church actually has a saint named Photinia, a woman who was "thrown by the sea" onto an island where she spent the rest of her life in fasting and prayer.

I had no idea that Svetlana was a pagan name...and I'd not known of St Photinia either......see how much we learn here?...lol..I will never look at that hedge in quite the same way again. I do like the 'Goddess of Light'. A young woman came in to get a library card one day and I fell in love with her name..'Illuminata'
edited to add...and so, does she go by Photinia or Svetlana?

I have too many in my backyard, all overgrown, all but one or two are coming out. I noticed that not all bloom like that either. Around town I have noticed that there are several blooming like the ones you pictured but there are many others including mine that have sparse blooms. Wonder why the difference.

I've been paying a lot of attention to them down here now..pruned, unpruned, size, flowering and all that I see that are unpruned are now flowering. I wonder how old the ones in your yard are.....although the ones I pictured are quite old. You had a good winter's worth of rain, so that shouldn't be the problem...dunno.....

I think mine are about 5-6 years old, I think.

I just saw your edit, Sherry. She goes by Lana, but here's another funny story about her name. When she was born in North Korea, my great-grandmother was living in China. My grandmother sent her a letter to tell her about her new great-granddaughter, named Svetlana. She went straight to church and asked the priest to say a mass for her new great-granddaughter. He asked for the name of the child. She had never heard the name Svetlana (because it was a pagan name), so she couldn't quite remember it, but she knew it was something new, so she told him it was "Aeroplana." So the priest said a mass for some unknown airplane, and a feminine one at that (the "a" on the end of the name means it's feminine).

Incidentally, the reason she was baptized "Photinia" is that she was born close to St. Photinia's day. There are saints associated with every day in the Russian Orthodox calendar. That's why Russians have namesdays or feast days in addition to their birthdays. Birthdays were never as big a deal as namesdays when I was growing up.

I love it! I hope she has a t-shirt that says 'Aeroplana'.
A saint for every day? No wonder I'd never heard of St. Photinia. If there are that many, I'd never remember them all.

There are usually two or three for each day. Some are saints and some are martyrs. Today, April 28th, is the feast day of the Nine Monk-Martyrs of Cyzikos, Theocharus and Apostolus (I don't know who they are, but they're evidently a package deal), and John the Martyr of Romania.

So many...I do wonder what each of them did to reach sainthood...

All of the branches of Catholicism required very little for sainthood at one time, so a person could become a saint merely by choosing not to bathe for 30 years. Today he would inspire only revulsion, but back in the Middle Ages and earlier he would be regarded as someone so spiritual that he had no regard for his physical body.