Proper Pruning Strategies For Your Landscape

Proper Pruning Strategies For Your Landscape.
Pruning is the selective removal of plant parts. It’s done to enhance the health of the plant, increase fruiting and flowering, for control of pests or diseases and for the overall goodness of the landscape plants.

Knowing the proper way to prune your landscape plants is really important. Any time you cut a branch while pruning, you stimulate vegetative growth behind that cut. Hence, it’s important to be careful with what you cut and how you cut it.

The two kinds of pruning cuts create different effects on the plant:

Heading cuts
This is also known as topping cuts. This type of pruning cut makes a tree or shrub look like it was having a bad hair day! A lot of vegetative growth is stimulated at the point of cut and may be costly in the long run since you may have to bring in the arborist more frequently.

Thinning cuts
This type of cut is much more selective and involves removing branches at the main tree trunk or near the soil line on shrubs.

Thinning cuts enables better light and air penetration into the canopy without changing the form of the tree or shrub. It also helps in decreasing disease and insect incidences.

Why Prune Landscape Plants?
 Proper pruning enables you to selectively remove certain parts of the plant such as leaves, shoots or branches for the following reasons:

 In order to improve the plant’s health by removing branches that are dead, diseased, insect infested or disease infested

 In fruiting trees, prune off deadwood, crowded canopy, inward growing branches, branches that are crossing, growing into the canopy or branches touching the ground. The idea is to open up the tree for sunlight and air to circulate through for better fruiting.
 To develop proper structure in trees and shrubs so that they don’t break easily causing damage to self, landscape or property.

 Improve the appearance of trees and shrubs. Pruning in this case involves removing branches with a narrow crotch angle, branches growing upwards and removal of water shoots or suckers.

 To control the growth and size of the shrubs or trees so that it’s easy to harvest fruit trees and not to block important views.

 Pruning at the right time is done to enhance flowering and fruiting in landscape plants or fruiting trees or shrubs. Know when flowering shrubs or fruit trees put out buds i.e either they flower on current wood or one-year old wood. Example, hibiscus shrubs flower on current wood and pruning by heading back these shrubs cuts off the flowering buds and you end up with a shrub with no flowers but a lot of vegetative branches!

 Pruning is also done in order to control the direction of growth and to utilize space more efficiently

 Lastly, pruning is done in order to balance the amount of shoots and roots in a plant especially after transplanting and to enhance the plant’s survival.

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