Pruning is often thought of as merely cutting back plants, but in reality, it is an art that requires understanding and skill. Pruning focuses on strategically guiding each plant’s future growth and health while considering the general aesthetic of the location where it’s planted.
Each cut can influence a plant’s health, growth, and even the amount of fruit it bears, making it an impactful and necessary process if you want to keep your garden in tip-top condition.
Understanding the Basics of Pruning
At its core, pruning involves selectively removing specific parts of a plant. This helps to control its shape, which is important for larger gardens or outdoor areas. It also ensures healthy growth and vitality.
While pruning may be simply described, there are many types, which we’ll look at below.
Heading
Heading involves cutting back the tips of branches to a bud. In doing so, we help stimulate the bud just below the cut to grow back more vigorously, leading to denser foliage. This is a common pruning practice to help shape young trees and shrubs, giving them a fuller appearance over time.
Thinning
Thinning is another technique wherein you remove entire branches or stems at their points of origin. While this may seem counterintuitive, this method helps increase light penetration and air circulation throughout the plant, which can help reduce the risk of disease. Thinning is especially beneficial for plants that have become too dense, which often results in stunted growth.
Improved airflow and light exposure can help counter these effects.
Deadheading
Deadheading is the process of removing spent flowers. This encourages the plant to focus its energy on stronger growth and can prolong the blooming period. By cutting back old blooms, you prevent the plant from directing its energy to seed production and steer it towards further vegetative and floral development.
Renewal Pruning
Renewal Pruning involves cutting plants down to ground level. Typically reserved for overgrown shrubs, it helps promote vigorous growth and rejuvenation while restoring their youthful look.
The Benefits of Proper Pruning Techniques
Proper pruning techniques are absolutely vital. Pruning without an appropriate understanding of the plant you’re working on, the reason for doing so or the technique can lead to irreversible damage.
Our Pruning specialists have spent significant time learning proper technique, ensuring our clients have confidence that their plants are in the right hands. When done correctly, pruning can help enhance a plant’s health, shape, and productivity.
This is achieved by optimising sunlight exposure and shaping the leaves to influence and enhance photosynthesis. By selectively removing parts of a plant, you can manage the light penetration and air circulation throughout, promoting a robust build-up of energy.
While appearance and growth are a focus, the prevention of diseases and pest infestations are also key outcomes of pruning. Overcrowded bushes and branches can create a humid environment, fostering the growth of fungi or harbouring insects. Thinning out these areas helps reduce moisture retention and minimise these issues.
Strategic removal also enables quicker wound healing, reducing the chances of infection.
Similarly, you’ll find that well-pruned plants typically produce more flowers and fruits. This is a direct result of pruning techniques that stimulate the growth of new, healthy branches. These branches are then more capable of supporting reproductive processes.
Eliminating old or diseased wood helps the plant divert energy towards developing vibrant, new growth.
Pruning for Specific Plant Types
Understanding the correct pruning times or techniques for specific plant types is vital to ensuring that pruning does not cause more harm than good.
Maples and oaks, for example, thrive when pruned during their dormant season, typically in late winter. This prevents the sap from bleeding, which can attract pests and diseases. Conversely, flowering shrubs like azaleas and rhododendrons benefit from pruning just after they bloom.
Cutting them back ensures you don’t accidentally remove buds set for the next season.
Plants like daylilies and hostas should be pruned in the fall to prevent diseases and promote healthier plants in the spring. In comparison, Fruit trees can benefit from winter pruning. This involves removing water sprouts and suckers that drain energy from the tree and maximising light exposure and airflow.
The list goes on. With so many plant species, fully understanding the best approach for your garden and plants is challenging yet vital if you wish to ensure proper growth and health.
Hiring Professional Pruning Services
Tackling pruning on your own can certainly be rewarding. There’s no better feeling as a green thumb than tending to the care of your garden and seeing it flourish.
Simple pruning techniques can be applied easily to open gardens without many plants. The challenge arises when your garden flourishes with plants of different species interwoven with one another. An additional challenge comes from managing trees, whether fruit trees or regular trees.
Having the gear and know-how to tackle these can be both costly and difficult, not to mention unsafe if you’re unfamiliar and untrained.
We always urge garden owners to consider their knowledge and understanding of pruning before deciding to do the task themselves. Poor pruning can be hard or impossible to reverse, and the last thing we want is someone to accidentally destroy their garden.
Professional pruning services, such as those we offer here at Oakland, are far more impactful than simply having someone do it for you. They give you peace of mind that your garden is in the hands of people who know the ins and outs and understand proper pruning techniques.
Our specialists understand various plant species and their intricate physiological needs and responses. Our expertise in plant pathology, entomology, and physiology allows us to accurately assess the structural integrity and health of your trees, shrubs, and plants. From that, we can work on effective and safe pruning, ensuring your garden remains looking its best and in the best health.
Pruning Your Garden
Diving into pruning, it’s easy to see how many complicated elements get lost in translation. Pruning is far more than “simply cutting your trees”; instead, it encompasses a lot of knowledge, technique, and understanding and is a process that can truly transform your garden.
If you need help pruning your garden and revitalising your plants, contact our team today.
