Crabapple – After if Blooms

A few weeks ago I posted an entry on pruning a Crabapple before it blooms.  So naturally, I have to do one on pruning them after they bloom: a more ideal time.  As with the Magnolia, this tree is in Ottawa, and so very much behind its siblings in Toronto.  nevertheless it was almost finished blooming, very overgrown, and very much past it’s peak.  So definitely time for pruning.

Now, when I say the tree was overgrown, I should point out that the owner gave it a very severe pruning last year.  However, the previous owner had let it do its own thing for many years, and there was a lot of catching up to do.  I’ve taken shots from two angles to try and give people an idea of how the growth was starting to get a little out of hand.  When a weeping tree is so shaggy that you can’t get any sense of it’s basic skeleton, it is time to get out the pruning saw.

There is still a ways to go before this tree is at that point, but I got a good start.  First I concentrated on cleaning up stubs, and short going-nowheres-sort-of-branches left from previous years prunings.  I also did some judicious thinning where the branches were going over to the neighbours, or trying to invade the space of the trees in the back corner of the yard.  This photo is actually the best at showing how much I thinned the tree out.  Unfortunately, this angle makes it look at though all the cuts are on this one side.  Trust me, I worked my way around the whole tree in a very methodical way.  Just to prove that, I have another interior shot of the tree – unfortunately there is no matching before shot for this, but I can assure you that you couldn’t see any blue sky in the background before.

Here are the overall after shots.  What I wish I had thought to do during the process was take before and after photos looking up into the crown of the tree so you could see the very necessary work of thinning that got done.  Part of my approach was to work to get some light and air back into the interior of the tree.  I succeeded rather well at that.  As far as getting it to look a little less wild – well there is still work to be done, but I thought we’d taken off enough for one year (especially considering the amount that had been taken off the year before) and I was afraid that taking off too much might just result in a whole mess of watersprouts (a term I will have to get around to defining one of these days).

Crabapple – Before it Blooms

Now I know that in General Principles I said to prune things that bloom in the spring after they bloom.  But sometimes you prune when you can, not when you should.  This particular crab apple has a very distinctive arch to the south.  That’s largely because there used to be a whopping big maple next door (north side), that it was competing with for light.  That tree finally came down (first a big chunk in a wind storm, and the rest less violently when the arborist got at it.  At any rate, the owner and I thought it would be nice to try and encourage some growth on the north-east side so the tree would some day look less lop-sided.  (The arch would be very nice, except for all that rambling growth up around the 2nd floor deck.  It’s a little too off balance for a proper wind-swept look.)

Now there was only myself and a step-ladder so the before and after photos of the whole tree won’t look that much different.  Although I did take off quite a bit from the far end – it just doesn’t show in the photo.

However, I think the main thing with this tree is showing the process of whittling down all those eager young sprouts, into just a few that can be encouraged to grow into new trunks that will eventually take over for the original ones.  Currently, the squirrels use the arching one as a highway to get up onto the house, eating flower buds on the way and generally leaving a real mess on the deck.  I think in the long run, that the growth growing straight up from the arch should go, but that requires more equipment than I’ve got at the moment.

So, here’s a close up of the base of the tree, so you can see what I had to choose from.  Got the beginnings of a lovely thicket there.  Just below you can see what I whittled it down to.  You can also see where I nicked the bark.  Sometimes the right tool for the thickness of the branch, is the wrong tool for the tight quarters in which one is working.  I switched to a smaller saw, and clippers to finish up.

If someone would invent some sort of laser-saw that would work in very tight spaces and not need a lot of muscle, and would only cut the branch you wanted and nothing around it – that would be brilliant.  This wasn’t even a crowded space, just that the branch came out at a very tight angle from the main trunk.

Below is the finished tree.  It doesn’t show, but I did shorten one branch considerably because of damage.  There is still more to do for future years.  An OK job, but far from my best.

You may wonder why I left so many branches coming up from the base.  The idea was to leave some choice for the future.  Depending on which one does best, some or all of the others can still be taken out in future years.  I just cut down on the current competition so the branches can fill out.  It is also much easier to thin out multiple branches when they are small.  The cut branches – or some of them went inside for bouquets.  And there was still oodles of bloom left on the tree.