My Fountain and Butchered Rosemary

I love my fountain.  It's one of the joys of my life.  See the green thing in the front corner of my fountain?  That's where I like to sit so I can stare at my beautiful yard.  This is a great place to go to sit and think.  At the back of the picture, you can see some of my potted herb garden.  I have 32 herbs growing there.  I spend many hours sitting on my front porch watching my yard while reading the textbooks for my ongoing Homeopathic courses.

In this picture, you can see the rosemary right behind my fountain. There are three of them now, I started out with five rosemary 18 years ago and two have died over the years.  There's a story behind my rosemary, as they've had their struggles to survive during their life.

I planted these rosemary 18 years ago at another house and when I moved from that house, I dug them up and carried them with me.  They were only 2 years old when I moved them, but they were already 2 1/2 feet tall and I was so scared they wouldn't survive being moved, but I had to try because I loved them.  Surprisingly enough, they all lived and this made me extremely happy. Then a few years later, we moved to the house we're in now and my poor rosemary had to be moved again. There wasn't any way I was going to leave them behind as they were very much a part of my life.  They all miraculously survived, again, and there was much rejoicing.  A couple of years later, two of them died, but the other three thrived and were monstrously gigantic.  They were so big and bushy that you couldn't even see through them and they were taller than me.  Then came the big drought during the summer of 2011.  So many branches turned brown and died that it took me 3 1/2 long pain filled hours to cut all of the dead parts off.  Now my beautiful rosemary look just like big bonsai.  Luckily, I think bonsai are so pretty.  I affectionately call them my rosemary bonsai and consider myself lucky that any of them survived. 
This is a secret about rosemary that I learned years ago.  When a sprig of rosemary dies, remove it IMMEDIATELY.  If you don't, then the limb will develop more and more dying parts until the whole limb is dead.  If you remove the dead sprig as soon as you see it, most of the time, the dying will stop and you've saved the limb.  Well, this is always the way it happens with my rosemary, so I assume all rosemary are the same.  After removing a dead sprig, keep your eye on that part of your rosemary to make sure the dying doesn't go to another sprig.  If it does, remove that sprig also.