COLUMN: Pruning time

This is an excellent time to prune most plants (except for the ones that are early spring flowerers because you don’t want to remove your flowers). In fact, I am helping a friend prune the plants in his yard. His wife says, “He is dangerous with tools in his hand.” I told her that pruning is not brain surgery. After thinking about it, pruning is plant surgery. I have never seen proper pruning kill a healthy plant but I have seen some rather ugly specimens.

I hope the extreme cold weather is over. Pruning stimulates growth and young growth that can be killed by cold. Also, some plants will bleed sap after pruning, but this usually does not damage the plant. High temperatures, however, will cause the bleeding sap and the pruning wound to dry quickly. I would say heal quickly, but plants truly don’t heal — they just shut-off or close-off the damaged area.

I see very little proper pruning in Florence. Shearers are the preferred tool to destroy the natural beauty of plants. Neat little balls have been substituted for properly pruned plants. The only proper use of a shearer is when you are doing topiary or the sculpting of plants into shapes like animals. Hand pruners and a pruning saw are my chosen tools. I only use loppers to reach limbs high in the plant and usually if a limb is too large to cut with the hand pruner, I use my pruning saw to keep from damaging the plant when too much pressure is applied with loppers.

Thinning is the proper way to prune plants. When you thin, you reach down within the plant to remove the limb at a crotch of another limb at least half the size of the one you removed. The remaining limb will now become dominant and prevent many sprouts from growing at the site of the cut. This process allows light to penetrate the structure of the plant and encourages thicker, healthier foliage. Usually proper thinning needs to be done only once a year.

Shearing or arbitrarily cutting back stems stimulates growth. Many sprouts grow where a stem is sheared resulting in the foliage becoming rather thick at the point of shearing, then light cannot enter the structure of the plant and the plant drops all interior leaves. This results in a weak plant with only a thin layer of exterior leaves — not to mention that when you start shearing, you need to keep it up all throughout the summer to keep the plants neat looking.

To learn the specifics on gardening, we have both free and for-sale publications at our office in the back of the public services building on the corner of Third Loop Road and South Irby Street. You may also visit our Home & Garden Information Center through our website at The Clemson University Cooperative.

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