When and what to prune depends upon your pruning goal. Don’t prune without a reason.This section provides garden-ready pruning information on more than 160 trees, shrubs, ground covers, and woody herbs and vines, including the plants mentioned in the main text. When reading this guide, keep the following points in mind:
When and what to prune depends upon your pruning goal. Don’t prune without a reason.
Remove dead, damaged, and diseased branches at any time.
Remove crossed and rubbing branches.
As long as you remove less than 15 percent of the leaves, prune when needed and at your convenience.
Do heavy pruning of most plants before buds break in late winter or early spring. This will reduce flowering that year for trees and shrubs blooming on old wood. It does not affect plants blooming on new growth.
Don’t prune plants when they’re wet.
Don’t prune in late summer and early fall, as new growth may not have time to harden off before winter.
To minimize pruning, pick a species or variety that will grow to the size you want.
For instructions and illustrations on each pruning method, see the page listed below.
Candling (pinching off soft new growth on some types of evergreens), pages 137–138
Cleanup (removing dead, diseased, damaged growth), page 11
Coppicing (cutting trees and shrubs almost to the ground), page 190
Deadheading (removing faded flowers), page 99
Espalier (training into a two-dimensional pattern on a wall, trellis, or wires), pages 180–184
Head back (prune to an outward-facing bud or branch within canopy), page 52, 61
Limbing up (removing lower branches), page 64
Pinching (squeezing off soft new shoots between thumbnail and forefinger), page 57
Pollarding (similar to coppicing, but higher off the ground), page 193
Pruning as standard (shaping into a round leafy crown above a short, single trunk), page 179
Renewal (rejuvenating old plants by removing one-quarter to one-third of the oldest wood each year until all old wood is gone), page 101
Renovating (cutting back stems to 6 to 12 inches above the ground), page 190
Root pruning (trimming the roots, often used for potted plants), page 70
Shearing (removing the ends of shoots for a smooth overall shape; it causes dense, twiggy growth below the cuts), page 59
Shrub-to-tree (turning a shrub into a small tree with a single trunk), pages 104–105
Sucker removal (pruning unwanted shoots from the rootstock and water sprouts from branches), page 98
Thinning (cutting stems and branches back to a trunk, big side branch, or the ground), page 63
Topiary (cutting to a decorative shape), page 175
Training (directing the structural growth of a young plant by selective branch removal), see the appropriate chapter for the type of plant.
