With Winter Pruning on the Mind, Avoid Cutting on These Woody Plants

Adjust your pruning technique for shrubs and trees that flower on old wood

wintertime is , loosely speaking , the ideal clip to rationalize mosttrees and shrubs .

profoundly dormant , thesewoody plantsexperience less tension when pruned in the wintertime months , and with nerveless temperatures , fewer pathogen are active and able to make their way into pruning cuts .

A few woody plant , however , are advantageously left through winter and pruned in another season . When you are performing your one-year structuralpruning , pass by these woodies for their own trade good .

Woody plants to avoid pruning in winter

Maples and box elder (Acerspp. and cvs.)

One of comparatively few grouping of regionally relevant landscape trees that winter - prune poorly , maples of all kinds push sap vigorously during the wintertime and former spring months . This is with secure reason : they are among the first trees to bloom in spring and provide excellent other - season pasture for insects . If pruned in winter , they will “ hemorrhage ” muggins profusely , run to unsightly bark streaking . This flowing of sugar - rich sap can also encourage the maturation of unwanted organism on the Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree . This sap , of course , is why maples are wiretap during the late winter , since it is the crude material for make maple syrup . Instead of winter pruning these trees , postpone morphological piece of work until the leaves are to the full expanded . Tree will ask cryptic , occasional watering after a summer pruning .

Branch cut from a boxelder in winter .

Sap transude from the boxelder , cause bark discoloration .

Birch (Betulaspp. and cvs.)

Just like maples , birch of many sort campaign sap from root to shoot during the wintertime and spring seasons to fire their early spring bloom . I ascertain this lesson the difficult way after think I was doing the right thing by wintertime cut a large river birch ( Betula occidentalis ) in one of my gardens , only to find that it oozed sap for over a month ; unsightly mould ontogeny followed on the trunk where the sap flow over the Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree ’s barque . I now summertime prune my birch and have had good results , but I always water deeply before and after summertime pruning to help mitigate tree stress .

Roses (Rosaspp. and cvs.)

Though gardeners in some milder regions can prune rose quite too soon , I postpone all rose pruning until bud rift in spring . Our erratic temperature swings and extreme temperatures — plus dryness — often lead in a high charge per unit of cane damage or death than is typically see in other regions . Additionally , I have found that pruning too early open up the plant ’s vasculature , which can be damage further in a succeedingcold snap . These day , I have the plants part to break dormancy in spring , ensure we are out of the hazard of grueling Robert Frost , and then prune . I first assess and remove dead and seriously damaged cane before moving on to prune what remains for health and structure , taking rosaceous character into account . In practice , this imply I often do n’t rationalize my rose until May .

In winter, don’t hard prune shrubs that flower on old wood

From a pruning standpoint , shrub can be divided generally into two groups for our region :

That eminence is deserving knowing when you are winter pruning in your garden . If you wintertime prune shrub that bloom on older Ellen Price Wood , you will also remove saltation bloom bud on that plant . This includes a number of regionally popular plants , like lilac ( Syringa ) , forsythia ( Forsythia ) , and shrubby potentilla ( Dasiphora fruticosa , formerlyPotentillafruticosa ) .

I treat this dilemma by perform a thinning pruning , absent a portion of the shrub ’s Sir Henry Joseph Wood each wintertime . Each winter I remove the oldest branches on the works , any scratch branch , and any utter Ellen Price Wood , and never more than one - third of the shrub ’s entire arm . These are comfortably slew right to the base with a sharp sawing machine or pair of pruning hook . This style of pruning , called thinning ( rather than head ) encourages vigorous , juvenile emergence each year while entrust two - third or more of the plant ’s wood mature enough to flower . If you are unwilling to sacrifice flower bud , perform a like thinning pruning just after efflorescence on these genera ; that is more traditional and works just fine .

Winter and former springtime remain the good seasons to carry out major pruning tasks . Plants and pathogens are dormant , and cut back for a healthy plant social structure is far easy without leave obscuring your persuasion . Still , it is impertinent to defer pruning of maple , birch tree , and rise , and to adjust pruning proficiency on shrubs that blossom on old wood to optimize plant wellness and aesthetic appeal for the coming growing season .

Learn more about pruning :

And for more Mountain West regional reports , click here .

Bryan Fischer lives and garden at the Cartesian product of the Great Plains and the Rockies . He is a horticulturist and the curator of works collections for a local botanic garden .

exposure : Bryan Fischer

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