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If you are careful about flower pruning, you will be amazed at the difference it makes. People worry about pruning because they try so hard to make the plant grow and here they are, cutting away parts of it.
A dear friend of mine is a retired arborist. Joe was visiting and noticed that one of the bushes had suffered some serious winter kill. Basically half the bush was dead looking. Joe got my pruning shears and went at the bush – well, like a mad man, hacking and snipping and trimming. I was concerned about the damage he might be doing but there was also a level of trust. I could not have done what he did.
It was amazing what he did. There was a pile of branches stacked in the yard and the bush looked kind of pathetic. Then the healing process began. The energy went into the healthy parts of the bush rather than pushing against the futility of feeding the dead branches. The plant bushed out and was positively laden with blossoms in June.
Like they say on television, don’t try this at home unless you know what you are doing. You can however start small. Make small changes.
The best time to trim and prune is in the winter when the bush is dormant. Depending on where you live this can be any time between January and March. Start with the dead branches. If there are a lot of dead branches, go slow. You don’t want to shock the system too much. If you have diseased looking branches, trim them too. Pruning flowers of course is a spring time or fall activity because they don’t tend to be above ground in the winter.
Once you have the dead or diseased branches cut away, take a step back and look at the bush or tree in full. Are there any other problems such as a branch growing in the wrong direction. Or maybe the shape of the whole bush is lopsided. Now is the time to shape it a little bit.
When pruning use sharp cutting tools. Each cut you make should be clean and smooth. If your tools are not sharp then you'll find yourself breaking and splitting remaining branch parts, and this causes stress and injury to the bush.
If you want your bushes to bush out a bit and become fuller looking, then make your pruning cuts just past a "knuckle" or "joint" in the branch. This usually causes new shoots to form on either side of the knuckle when the bush wakes up in the spring.
Flower pruning is a kind thing to do for your plants and bushes and trees. It focused their energy in the right places.
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