It’s June, time to prune

It’s what almost every garden needs and what almost no garden gets.  

RENEWAL PRUNING

Are there any full-grown azaleas, spireas, weigelas or snowball viburnums (V. macrophalem) in your garden?  Then there’s a 99 percent chance that they need renewal pruning and now’s the time to do it.  

First, remove any dead stems and branches.  But that’s just a warm-up.  The real fun is in removing one-third of all the stems all the way to the ground or close to it.  Ah, but which stems to remove?

• Stems that are growing where you don’t want them to grow, like hanging over a walkway or bullying a nearby shrub.
• Stems that are crossing other stems, especially the ones that begin on the outside and grow through the middle, crowding the whole interior of the plant.
• If those two types don’t add up to one-third of the stems, take out the oldest ones next.  Conveniently, these are often the tallest - too tall, in fact.  People are tempted to cut them back a foot or two at the top and the result is even more growth up there where it spoils the shape of the plant.  The plant becomes top-heavy, especially if it has large flowers to hold up, like this snowball-type viburnum.

Almost everyone who hires me has plants that need renewal, so I’ve explained this technique many, many times and people are totally unbelieving.  This type of pruning (the correct kind!) is SO counterintuitive, it takes a total leap of faith to actually try it.  I give my pep talk but after I drive away, who knows?

Readers, give it a try.  I’ll go out on a limb and promise that you can’t kill one of these plants by doing what I’ve suggested. 

HOW TO LEARN TO PRUNE

But what if you have some other shrub that’s not on the list above?  Or say your old azalea is part of a large crowded mess of shrubs and you have no idea how to tackle the problem.  No book or website can really provide the answer, and you’re thinking you might need someone to do it for you - or better yet, teach you how to do it.   Hiring an arborist (or a gardening coach)  to come to your garden, assess the situation, and teach you to take care of your shrubs and small trees for no more than you’d pay for a lawn treatment would be money awfully well spent.  Super-low-maintenance shrub gardens fill out and look great and really are low-maintenance, but not no-maintenance.  Without yearly pruning they become unruly jungles.   Keeping shrubs beautiful, healthy, and the right size for the landscape is SO damn easy, but very few homeowners will give it a try.

Here’s what might help - if just some of the TV segments about "How to create a container garden" were retired to the archives and demonstrations of "How to prune your azaleas" were shown instead.  Hey, I’d even wield the Felcos myself - for the cause.