Quick Tidy

Being part of a community garden, this little yellow variegated euonymus doesn’t get regular attention, but this winter left it with a rather unsightly bare patch on one side, which I figured deserved cleaning up. That was easy, I just cut out anything dead or nearly dead.  Euonymus can be pruned just about any time, and I didn’t get around to this one until late May, but then we had a very late Spring this year, so I am filing this under early spring as well as late spring pruning.

Before

After

As with many low-growing euonymus, this one often sends up the odd shoot that grows so much higher than anything else that it looks a little out of place. With shoots like that I usually try to cut back to below where I want the branch to end; that way the new growth will then have somewhere to grow to before it too needs heading back. (OK that was an awkward sentence.)

The yellow Dwarf Iris were added some years after the euonymus and placed there to high-light the yellow in the leaves, just for a few weeks in spring.  Later in the year there are Black-eyed Susans, but I don’t think the yellow is quite as good a match.  There are, however, lots of other colours (mostly pink) to relieve all that yellow.

Minuet in Yellow

#%**# Forsythia

As you may have gathered from the title, Forsythia are not my favourite shrub.  I try to work with the natural growth habits of a shrub, anticipating how it will grow after I cut.  With Forsythia, however, I find this next to impossible.  The buds are in alternate, opposite pairs, which should make predicting future growth dead easy, but the thing just grows all higgledy-piggledy and I am far less confident that I am pruning to maximize flowering than I am with almost any other shrub.  People like them because they give some of the earliest colour in the garden (at least here in North-East North America), despite the fact that they don’t have much to recommend them the rest of the year.

Here is what happens if you try to shape them, as some people do.  You end up with bald patches with no flowers in the spring because the potential buds got cut off the summer before.  I ask you, what’s the point!

Now here, below, is how they look if you let them follow their natural higgledy-piggledy inclinations.  A lot messier, but a lot more colour.                                             I think they work best on larger properties, tucked away in a far corner where you can see a burst of yellow from them in the spring and then ignore them the rest of the year.   However, this blog is about pruning, so here is the pruning part of this entry.

Here’s the same shrub after it had finished blooming.  As you can see from this angle, it does tend to list to port and compete with the Viburnum next to it.  Here quickly are the before and afters from last year when it was even more jungly.  (That’s a real word in my family – even if it’s not in the dictionary)

Before

←last year

After

(both years)

←last year

As you can see from both years, the shrub is a lot lighter when I’m done with it, but spends the rest of the year getting caught up.  I know the front looks rather bare this year.  There was a further forward stem I was hoping to keep, but it got damaged in the pruning, and had to go.  However, I know that lower stem with the two young shoots will fill in the center for me.  (At least I hope it will – as I said, Forsythias are a bit unpredictable.)

So here are the before and after from this year.

As you can see there is not much to choose between the two this year, but the front middle is starting to fill in a bit.

Just as an afterthought, I would like to put in a plug for Hamamelis japonica (Japanese Witch Hazel – to the left and below) as an alternative.  It has a nice, regular, shape and blooms about a month before the forsythia.  Then if you really want to go to town you could get Hamamelis virginiana (NA Witch Hazel) as well and have the last thing to bloom in the fall.

A Tale of Two Viburnum

Viburnums, for the most part, have stems that go straight up and side-branches at 90° angles.  They alternate between shooting straight up and branching out, resulting in a sort of layer cake look.  When they are blooming, it’s like a layer cake with icing.  (Usually a broad cake, but with certain varieties a very narrow one.) Sometimes, however, they forget about the branching out part and just shoot straight up, and when that happens with only a few stems it does give the shrub a rather odd look.

I’ve got one viburnum I’ve been looking after for years that tends to do this, and each year I cut back the errant stems.  Obviously the shrub and I have different ideas of what its natural shape should be.  Here it is just as the blooms are fading.  Fortunately, my camera couldn’t focus on anything so delicate, so the blooms don’t look past their peak – just out of focus.

And here is the latest round of hair cuts.  Starting of course with the before look, plus the requisite close – up.  With the back-lighting it is hard to see those errant branches, but trust me they are there.  Just to prove it – here’s after.  And here is the close-up.  Not much different here as this was not a major pruning – just a wee tidy up.  

 

 

Now for something completely different.  This one is a ‘Snowball’ Viburnum – not the most useful designation I must admit.  I checked my reference books and there are at least three varieties that are called ‘Snowball’.  At any rate,                ‘Snowball’s’ or at least this one, are far more interested in growing up than anything else, which makes them good for tighter spaces.  The difficulty with this one was that it hadn’t been pruned in a long time and had gotten a little leggy and very disease prone.  A close-up of the base will give you a better idea, since from a distance, it looks just fine.  The shrub, as you can see close-up had started sending up numerous suckers, while the main stems got really long and lanky.   Normally one would want to encourage any growth lower down.  However, I also had to contend with insect infestations which were easiest to deal with by pruning off the worst affected areas.  Annoyingly, those were often lower down then new, healthy growth.  As you can see, I got rid of a lot of the suckers and anything that was trying to spread out into the patio stones (on one side) or the lawn (on the other).  I then cut back the top a fair bit to try and get the plant to bush out a little bit.  I’m just doing a thumbnail of this after shot as it is from the same angle as the one above and so really shows the change in height, but I think this next photo gives a much better idea of how the shrub looks overall.  Normally, I would have waited until it had finished blooming to prune it, the way I did with the first Viburnum in this entry, but sometimes you just have to prune when you can.  Hopefully, with a little TLC this shrub will be better able to cope with the various aphids and leaf curls that were attacking it this spring.

 

Bridalwreath Spirea – When You’ve Got Too Much Of A Good Thing

I love the way Bridalwreath Spirea (or May Bush – if you prefer) looks like a veritable cataract when allowed to do its own thing.  That being said, the last two years we’ve had massive rainstorms just before I’ve had to prune, and this (←) is the result.  A sodden mess smothering everything in sight.  Actually, the smothering started earlier, but it’s easier to ignore when you’re looking at masses of delicately scented froth.  I’m just going to give you the highlights of last year, and then go into this year in more depth.  Since Spireas (all of them) send up multiple stems from the base, the easiest way to deal with a shrub that has gotten too big is to just take out some of the older stems.  Which is what I did last year.  You can use that nice round reddish rock in the left-hand bottom corner for reference to get an idea of how much I took out.  And then there is the overall photo.  As you can see much lighter than is was before I started pruning.  And this is how it looked this spring when it started blooming again.  A glorious thing again, but smothering everything in site, including some new Reticulated Iris I had bought in the fall.  In all fairness, I had expected the Iris to bloom much earlier – like before the Spirea got going, instead of having to lean drunkenly westward in the quest for light.  Then, just like last year – rain!  So here we go again.  Pruning time!  Time to show both front and side.  Despite the fact that it’s not as big a mess as last year, I felt very strongly that I needed to be more drastic.  (Just as an aside, I took close-ups from the front and the back, but the growth is so dense that it took me a long time to figure out which side I was looking at, as there were no reference points – this is the back – I think.)  Now I could just cut the thing down to the nubbins and wait a few years for it to recover, but that is not my favourite option.  So, instead I took out all the older stems that I could get at.  (Part-way through the process.↓)

This is where I have an issue with pruning manuals.  They never mention that with shrubs like this, getting at the older stems usually means going through a number of the younger stems.  If you aren’t willing to sacrifice some of the newer stems (or if you haven’t got a lot to spare), then the alternative it to cut back the older stems higher up.  I suppose I should clarify – when I say take out some of the older stems – I mean taking them out down to the ground or as close as you can get.  With something as dense as this bush, however, sometimes you have little alternative but to leave stubs.  Fortunately, with multi-stemmed shrubs, you simply wait a few years and then the stub should be dead enough to just snap out.  That doesn’t always work, of course.  Sometimes the stubs just send up a whole new mass of stems that you have to cope with in subsequent years.

So, here (←) is the after of the base.  I’m hope it’s from the same angle, but I can’t guarantee it.  However, to give you an idea of just how much I took off, here are the overall shots from two angles.  You can actually see the Mock Orange in behind now.  Which you could just barely do before.  I can’t decide if it makes that garden bed look larger or smaller now that I can actually see the edges of it.

Now I know that some people like to take electric clippers to Bridalwreath Spirea and keep them all neat and tidy that way.  However, I think they just resemble giant light-bulbs if you do that.  I prefer the cascade of froth.  I’ve just pruned so that hopefully I’ll be dealing with a smaller waterfall next year, and not something that is trying to compete with Niagara Falls.

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).

Magnolia – Maintaining Magnificence

Magnolias have a magnificent burst of bloom in spring, and then settle in for quiet elegance for the rest of the year.  That means that the best time to prune them is just after they have finished blooming.  As bloom time varies somewhat depending on where you live that could be anytime from mid- to late-spring.  This particular beauty is in Ottawa, so not surprisingly it was not quite finished blooming when I came up from Toronto for a visit, despite the fact that all the Magnolias in Toronto were well past their bloom time.  Toronto and Ottawa are a whole hardiness zone apart, which makes approximately two weeks difference in the start and end times for just about everything, which meant pruning a little early – but sometimes you just have to prune when you can.  As you can see, this Magnolia has a lovely overall shape, it’s just getting a little big for the space – particularly with regards to the garden shed.  Neither the shed nor the tree are going to get moved anytime soon, so it’s a matter of bringing the tree in a bit while still retaining its natural shape.                              There is a bit of a gap on the right (which you can sort of see ↑) that is the result of branch having been damaged sometime in the past, but that area will hopefully fill in again over time.

Here is the requisite close-up of the base.  For once you will not notice much of a difference between the before and after shots, except for the fact that I forgot to go for the vertical shot after.  There was very little that needed to be taken down to the base – so the structure is essentially the same.

The main difference only really shows in the overall shots.  With a tree (or shrub) like this where I am not dealing with a great deal of excess growth or damage, I tend to go for a two pronged strategy.  I take out any damaged or crossing branches, and thin branches to keep the naturally open structure of the Magnolia.  But I also balance off the thinning cuts with heading back cuts – cuts designed to encourage the plant to thicken out a bit.  This way, I make the tree a bit smaller, but once the new growth starts it should be just as lush as it was before, and not a shadow of its former self.  I also took the opportunity to discourage the tree from growing too close to the shed, but hopefully in a balanced way so it looks comfortable in the space, and not cramped on one side.  Unfortunately, most of the bloom that got taken off in the pruning went the way of all flesh.  Flowers that were already open just up and dropped their petals.  I did manage to save a few buds to take indoors as a small reminder of how beautiful this tree was when it was at its peak.

Three Little Maids – Rose of Sharon

I wasn’t sure whether to put this under Spring Pruning, or Late Spring Pruning, so I put it under both.  Rose of Sharon blooms very late in the year, it also leafs out very late in spring, and I kind of like to wait until I can see those hints of green before I start pruning.   Mostly, I’m removing dead tips, old seed pods, and shortening a little, but sometimes there is more to do.  These ‘three little maids’ are actually in good shape, but the garden bed is small, and they are very close together so a little pruning on a regular basis is a good idea to keep them in proportion with the bed and with one another.  So here are the individual before pictures.  I did think of naming them after the ‘three little maids’ in the title, but I realize gardeners are not necessarily Gilbert & Sullivan fans, so I’ve desisted.        The middle one of the three I photographed from the side, so you could get a better sense of what it looked like both before and after, as it’s slightly behind it’s sisters and a little obscured by them.  However, it did make a good subject for some before and after closeups to demonstrate another General Principle:  removing growth that is growing inwards and/or rubbing against other  branches.  Before →, After ↓.   Just wish I’d been the same distance away when I photographed.  However, I think it illustrates the point.  Rose of Sharon has a naturally open structure, and I like to encourage that.    So here are the three after shots.  This was the first year giving these three a trim so I was a bit more drastic than I usually am with Rose of Sharon.     I probably did the most work with the one ↑ that is on the far right of the group as it is leaning a lot due to competing with its sisters and in consequence having a bit of a contretemps with the sandcherry to its right.  It’s like trying to keep down the bullying in a schoolyard.  You have to keep everyone far enough apart that they don’t fight.  So here we are, the Three Little Maids from School (OK so I got my G&S reference in anyway).

Red Osier Dogwod – To Hard Prune or Not to Hard Prune?

Red osier dogwood, or tag alder, or if we are being proper Cornus stolonifera: most people grow this for it’s beautiful red bark, which really stands out against the winter snow.  In the wild it gets nibbled by deer and keeps a nice mid-sized profile with lots of bright red bark.  In gardens it tends to take off without the deer to prune it, and the older bark looses much of the intense red colour that was the reason for buying it in the first place.  That’s where pruning comes in.

Here’s one that hasn’t been pruned hard for a long time.  You can really see the loss of colour at the base.  It’s also leaning forward towards the light; in fact, the previous year I had removed some growth that was so low and long as to be almost horizontal and it was starting to root and form a thicket.  This is the afterwards.  I haven’t cut it back hard as the owner likes the privacy screening that it provides for the porch.  However, I am gradually taking out older stems and encouraging new growth so that the whole thing will be lower and bushier overall.           So, on the left is the same shrub a year later, just before pruning.  As you can see I like to prune these very early, just as they are about to leaf out.  The new buds come in so tightly to the stem that the only time you can cut without having to leave a large stub, is if you get in there before they have really leafed out.  Since pruning from the bottom up is one of the General Principles I like to take close ups of the base for before and after as well as an overall photo.   So here is the before close up on the right and below is the after closeup.  As you can see I got a lot more drastic this year with regards to removing older stems.

Below  is an overall look at the after pruning for this particular shrub.

It’s so low now that you can get a really good look at the climbing hydrangea that is next to/behind it – but I’m saving that one for another entry.

Now, of course, you are wondering about the title of this entry and wondering where the hard pruning comes in.  Right about now, in fact.  Like the shrub above, this one had gone virtually unpruned for many years, and was trying to form a thicket and push out its neighbours.  For some inexplicable reason I don’t have the original before photo for this, so you will just have to take my work for it that it was around 8 feet tall.  This is in fact the follow-up photo a few weeks after pruning, and as you can see it has started to leaf out.  When you cut a shrub back this hard you are usually cutting back to dormant buds that are not showing any particular signs of life other than the slight markings that show where they are.  Other than that you sort of have to take it on faith that they will break dormancy.    Here it is the next spring, and as you can see, despite the hard pruning it is back to reaching for the top of the fence, although this time it is not competing as much with it’s neighbours.  (Mind, I had to do something similar to the neighbours as they too were getting too big for the space they were in.)     The requisite close-up of the base.  (Before on the left, and after below on the right.) As you can see, one of the stems I shortened the year before, never really branched out – just sort of went into shock and died – so it will have to go.  As you can see, I was not quite as drastic as last year with this one.  Since I cut it back hard last year, it needs a chance to branch out; although there are some people who like to cut their osiers down hard each year, rather like willows, in order to get lots of little stems with intense colour.  In this case I’m going for something in between that and having it turn into an oversized mess.  So here we are all happily pruned for the year and raring to go.  These dogwoods do bloom in summer, which is another reason to prune them early in the year, but the blooms are not what most people notice, and if for whatever reason you find yourself needing to prune this later in the year, go for it.  (Which is why this entry is under Late Spring Pruning as well as Spring Pruning.) Just be aware that the earlier you prune it, the more time it has to produce intensely coloured stems to brighten your garden in the winter.