WELL, HERE WE are in the new year with wonderful weather and the snow all melted.
Now is a very busy time of year. January and February pruning should be your No. 1 full-time job!
Today, we will start our pruning course, keeping in mind the essential tenets.
1. Be confident that you can do this correctly and that it is good for the plant.
2. Be able to visualize the finished product before pruning down the plant to its inner self.
3. Be decisive, making each cut for a particular reason and altering the height, shape, size or character of the plant.
With these tenets, let’s add the two basic techniques of all pruning you will be performing.
Regardless of the plant, you will be using a repertoire of 2 basic cuts: heading and thinning.
Thinning
Thinning is a prune designed to remove a branch from which it is originated. This cut is made nearly flush with the main branch (or trunk), leaving a very small branch collar an inch or less from the main branch.
Never leave a large noticeable stub here to rot away into the plant. Leaving this small collar helps the plant in callusing over the cut and does not destroy the cambium layer (layer of rapidly dividing living cells that form wood and bark level) crucial to the plant’s survival.
Thinning allows remaining branches to grow in the intended direction and in their normal character. Thinning opens up the plant, which reduces wind damage, snow load or ice and rain damage. Thinning also greatly increases sunlight to both the interior of the plant and the ground. This increased sunlight creates a healthier, lusher plant and at the same time provides for better growing conditions under the plant.
Heading
Heading is the other technique of pruning in which one cuts the branch back to a bud, pair of buds or a node rather than down to the next branch. When a plant is headed back, a lot of the newest tip-growth is removed.
Heading tends to remove the terminal (growth tip) buds. This is good, for it causes those bud areas behind the cut to grow (break). As the nodes break along the branch, the plant becomes dense.
When we shear hedges, we perform a type of heading. All those neat topiary plants in various shapes are caused by heading.
All too often people head their plants when they should be thinning instead.
The topping (heading) of large trees for views or because of electrical wires is often extreme and wrong. Thinning is the form of pruning you should use in order to reduce trees, roses, heather, lilacs, evergreens or anything extending into the house. Heading produces a thick veneer growth right on the surface, which grows faster towards the object upon which it intrudes.
Successive wrong pruning creates a tangled mess of sticks and twigs just underneath the growth line.
In the case of heather or low-lying evergreens next to walks or driveways, once you head this inner woody zone, you are left with an unattractive, leafless, brown mob for years to come. Thinning is the technique to be used, reaching far into the plant and cutting whole branches off the trunk.
This week’s work
So now comes this week’s work. We are off to thin. First go to any hedges or formally controlled bush and thin it.
Remove all crossover branches and those that rub other branches. Look at these leaf structures and just look at how thick it is. Remove whole branches or secondary branches in order to thin that top-heavy growth.
Next, let’s move to your evergreens and discuss evergreens’ inherent dilemma.
All conifers require a slightly different approach. Most needled evergreens grow slowly from the branch tip. Heading, if made behind this tip, only causes stubs or notches that are left not to grow back. Approach evergreens as all other plants. First, cut away all weak, broken, crossover branches. Remove all errant growth and dead wood on the plant.
Now, decide if you want the branches limbed up, or if you’re looking for gentle, ground-sweeping character.
Make all these cuts as thinning cuts only.
If you want limbs out of the driveway, then thin that limb way back into the primary or secondary branches (scaffold).
If you want that evergreen thick and lush and at the same time limit its growth rate, then you will head the newest growth.
During the growth season on pines, cut off half of the new candle (new growth at tip seen roughly February to May) after it has elongated and turned slightly green.
To make other evergreens thicker, make a series of minor thinning cuts. By taking secondary tip branches back to a side shoot, you will reduce size and encourage thick new growth.
Next week, we will attack your shade trees and the orchard, so have a good bow or orchard saw ready. Sharpen and oil up your pruners, inspect ladders.
So … be safe, all!
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Andrew May is a freelance writer and ornamental horticulturist who dreams of having Clallam and Jefferson counties nationally recognized as “Flower Peninsula USA.” Send him questions c/o Peninsula Daily News, P.O. Box 1330, Port Angeles, WA 98362, or email news@peninsuladailynews.com (subject line: Andrew May).
