Late winter can be an excellent time to get outside and start your gardening/landscape care season. One task to get out of the way before the busy season starts is pruning decidous trees and shrubs while they are still dormant, transforming them from messy problems to great looking specimens.
The first branches to prune out are those that are dead, damaged or diseased. Many times a dead or diseased branch is rather obvious, even without leaves, but to check you can lightly rub the bark with your fingernail. A live branch will have a green layer underneath. Damaged branches are those that are broken or sustaining a wound or injury from impact. Wipe your pruners with a disinfecting solution when you have cut any diseased branches and before moving to another plant to avoid spreading disease.
You can also remove suckers and water sprouts to greatly enhance the appearance of your woody plants. Suckers are branches sprouting from the base of the tree and water sprouts are straight stems growing at right angles to branches.
After you have removed the problem branches you can focus on shaping your deciduous trees and shrubs. The beauty of winter pruning is that you can clearly see the plant’s shape without the leaves. Make the cuts back to where the branch originates to keep the plant looking its best. Going slow is the trick, keeping the plant’s natural shape in mind. While standing back for perspective take a look at the plant to judge it’s shape and where to cut. After you’ve made a few cuts again take a step back and see how it looks and where to go in and cut next.
If you take a look at the before and after photos at the top of the post you can see we cleaned up this Viburnum prunifolium that had been planted along with others the previous fall. For the health of the plant going into winter we did not do any pruning at that time. The purpose of this planting was to provide some screening so we kept in mind we’d be back to prune more the following spring and not take out too much during that first pruning.
If it sounds too intimidating or you’d just like some reassurance, set up a garden coaching appointment!
What not to prune in winter in the Chicago area:
Roses – please wait until at least mid-April to prune
Hydrangeas – this gets complicated with all the varieties BUT…you can safely prune the spent flowerheads off of all varieties in late winter. I’m going to follow up with a post on Hydrangea pruning very soon:-)
Spring flowering shrubs – if you have Magnolias, Forsythia, crabapples, lilacs, etc. be aware that pruning now will cut off blooms. If you must prune them bring the branches inside to force. Simply cut the stems ends on a sharp angle so they can take in a lot of water and put them in a vase to enjoy. They will begin to bloom within a week or so. I used to have a Quince that I would start cutting branches from to force in February. It was wonderful!