Landscape Maintenance: Guidelines for Pruning in Winter
Among landscaping maintenance tasks, pruning is one of the most important. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the most misunderstood. It’s not unusual for homeowners to chop away growth without considering how their actions will impact the plant. A low-quality landscape maintenance service will sometimes take pruning shortcuts by “shaving” hedges or trees using an electric clipper. Sure, it’s easy to create a uniform shape this way, but it damages the plant by fostering growth at the tips. In the long run, this lazy pruning approach can even kill plants by creating stagnancy at their centers. In this sense, proper pruning can help cut costs you’d otherwise have to spend on replacement plants.
Beyond technique, many people are confused about the proper time of year to prune. Following is a list of landscaping maintenance rules for wintertime pruning.
Cut back crossed branches. It’s unhealthy for branches to rub against each other, so prune crossing branches in the winter or early spring.
Use pruning to encourage growth. As every landscape maintenance service expert knows, wintertime pruning fosters robust growth in the spring by reducing the number of buds that must be sustained. On the other hand, summertime pruning discourages growth by decreasing the number of leaves that can take in food for root storage over the winter. Therefore, if you want to see significant growth in a certain plant, you should prune it in the winter. (By the way, this guideline doesn’t apply to evergreens, which store food in their branches and needles throughout the year.)
Summer- and fall-flowering shrubs. Some plants produce flowers on same-season growth. For instance, the prodigious butterfly bush flowers on growth that is produced in the spring and summer. Typically, plants in this category (including Rose of Sharon, summersweet, beautyberry and abelia) flower in May or later. If you hope to achieve excellent landscape maintenance, cut back this group of bushes before new growth starts in the spring. Butterfly bushes can even be cut back to the base. (Be sure to research proper pruning techniques for each species; some summer-blooming plants, such as hydrangeas, should be pruned as soon as they’ve finished flowering.)
Do not prune buds. As a rule, you should delay pruning until a tree or bush has flowered. Otherwise, you could drastically lower flower production, a definite no-no in landscape maintenance. Homeowner favorites including lilac, forsythia, plum and witch hazel are very early bloomers. Avoid pruning these early-flowering plants until spring, after they’re done blossoming.
Any time of the year is right for cutting away diseased, damaged or dead branches. Although any time of year is fine for pruning dead wood, many gardeners prefer to do it in the winter, when there aren’t as many leaves blocking your view of what should be cut back as part of routine landscape maintenance.
Avoid pruning roses until after Presidents’ Day. Cold-growth rose buds are unlikely to thrive. Therefore, it’s best to prune roses after Presidents’ Day or prior to the hard freeze.
Prune to create open space in the center of plants. Just as humans need plenty of fresh air to live, plants require circulation to thrive. They do best when air can smoothly flow through their centers. For this reason, you should cut away central growth if the center of a shrub looks too restricted.