Winter presents the ideal time to prune a great many things, so I am going to attempt to inspire you to get your landscape specimens pruned… and properly. This will be a difficult subject to explain through verbiage, but I am thinking we can at least tackle some basics over the coming weeks. My hope is to not only get your pruning juices flowing, but get you as a gardener to always think before you prune. Winter is never, ever the time to cut back evergreens, of any kind – wait until later after frost and tackle those plants all through the spring and summer. Our winter discussion pertains to all of the deciduous treasures in our gardens and timely pruning on these wonderful specimens.
Not everything in the landscape will need pruning, but there are plenty of examples that will, in all of our yards. I readily admit that pruning can be a bit intimidating, particularly if you are not very confident in knowing what plants you have in your garden. Step one should be to ask for help identifying those mystery plants you are not sure what to do with, and allow a Certified Professional Horticulturist or Arborist steer you towards success. Consider attending a pruning seminar at your local garden center or Arboretum. Plants surely have preferences on how they like to be treated and will let you know accordingly if you have wronged them in any way. To start with, ponder a few rules that I try my best to live by when it comes to this pruning decision-making process.
Always have a purpose. Are you trying to increase production? With fruits and berries, pruning this time of year is perfect to not only control size but also to improve your crop. Are you looking for more flowers? Timing is everything to achieve this, and understanding how your plant grows is paramount. Is that plant blocking a view and the neighbor is threatening to sue? Is this plant infringing on the porch, entryway or deck? Is that plant burying the fence or its neighbor? Is that tree really supposed to be so lopsided? All great reasons, or purposes, to prune, for sure. Walk your landscape and jot down some notes, accompanied by a purpose of why, and you have the start of a battle plan. This one maybe gets cut back a bit, that one gets limbed up, the other has some dead wood that needs to be removed kind of thing.
Follow the one-third rule. You can safely cut back a specimen one-third in height or width with most plants, although not as much with evergreens. I will raise my hand and admit wholeheartedly that I have broken this one-third rule many times in my gardening life, mainly with older, neglected Rhododendrons and Azaleas. Say you inherit an overgrown yard or forget about a particular plant for a few years… now what do you do? It is always worth a try to cut that plant back severely and see how it recovers before digging it up and sending it to the great compost heap in the sky. If it does not work, learn a lesson, replace it with a more suitable selection for the location, and keep up on the yearly pruning/tidying so that it does not happen again.
Prune for plant health. This is a huge one with me personally, especially to help avoid many kinds of diseases. Keeping plants open and airy with a more natural shape (and not congested and twiggy) increases air flow and allows sunlight to penetrate better. Simply put, it helps with disease and allows for a more natural and healthy specimen. This includes one plant crowding or shading another, and may perhaps show us that sometimes we have too many plants in too small of an area.
Utilize the right weapons and keep them sharp. Having quality tools for the job and keeping them in good condition is vital. Make your life easier and examine your pruning arsenal to make sure you have what works for you. Dull pruners mash your plants, producing cuts that do not heal properly and ask for diseases to infect them. An excellent place to start is a great pocket sharpener. Add in a useful lopper, some good hedge shears, an extendable pole pruner, a folding pocket saw in a couple sizes, and of course quality hand-bypass pruners and any gardener should be ready for battle.
Remember to prune after bloom. With very few exceptions (most notably fruits and berries) this is the best rule to live by, without question. Once this or that plant blooms, cut it back IF it needs it to control size. Personally, this is one I see many gardeners breaking every year, especially in winter, and as a result they sacrifice their flower displays. Why did my Rhododendron hardly flower this spring? Perhaps because you cut it back too late or over the winter, removing its flower buds. Why is my Forsythia not blooming coming out of winter? My Quince? My Flowering Currant? Because you pruned them over winter, removing flower buds and did not wait until after they were done flowering. We will get into this even more next week.
I have said many times that gardening is an excursion of trial and error, and pruning may be the poster-child for this. My hope is that over the coming weeks, as we delve into this more, you will feel more confident and comfortable pruning the various plants in your yard. Please no butchery - the chainsaw on a stick may work nicely for the hedge, but it is not for the vast majority of the landscape. Gardeners come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, just as plants do. Perhaps you like the round, cube and/or triangular-shaped shrubs… certainly, you do you, but I am hoping that you will consider letting things go a bit more natural. If you have to hack a plant back year after year, it may simply be the wrong plant in the wrong spot. So let’s go against the old classic Eastwood western and try for the good, but do our best to avoid the bad and ugly pretty please.
Don’t forget, leaves up and roots down…
