The word “pruning” can strike fear in the hearts of some home gardeners. After paying a bundle to landscape your garden, you may feel squeamish about cutting off those high-dollar shoots and branches.
But spring pruning can really be broken down into what I call the “three Ds”: dead, diseased and demented. This time of year, you really shouldn’t be pruning drastically. After all, new growth is springing forth and you shouldn’t be pruning it away. Severe pruning should be done from November through February before new growth emerges.
What this means during this time of year is that you need to remove anything from the plant that is dead. After a long wet and cold winter, even a healthy plant will have at least a few dead twigs or tips of branches that have died off. These should be the first to go.
Once the dead stuff is gone, it’s much easier to see what else needs to be done. That brings us to diseased. Look for anything on the plant that doesn’t look healthy. If a branch is discolored, gnarled or has spots, weird-looking growths or dimples in the wood, go ahead and hack it away.
And that brings us to the final “D,” which is demented. This is where your true artistic judgment comes into play. You can best define a demented branch as any that grows in a way it should not. In many shrubs, I begin by removing any branches or canes that are thinner than a pencil. This is especially true for roses. In fact, with many shrubs the thin stuff is actually the dead stuff, and it was not strong enough to ride out the cold, wet winter months.
The general idea is to have strong, healthy, thick branches. Removing the tiny ones simply allows more space and air for the bigger, healthier ones to receive all of the plant’s energy without wasting it on tiny, twiggy growth.
Demented branches often grow near the center of the shrub, away from light and air. This, as you must agree, is crazy behavior. Remove those, and you will also improve air circulation. Often these demented branches are also criss-crossing one another. It’s not nice to cross people, and it’s equally wrong for branches to behave like this. A cardinal rule of pruning is to remove branches that are criss-crossing each other. There’s no room for growth, air, sunlight or future flowers. Simply put, it creates unhealthy congestion.
From the looks of the unpruned plants, trees and hedges I’ve seen in my travels around town, some home garden enthusiasts have not been very enthusiastic about basic pruning. I mean, when tree branches are touching the ground and you have to walk around them, why not prune?
So get out the pruners, lopping shears and even chain saws (in drastic cases). Do yourself and your neighbors a favor by pruning those unkempt specimens.
