The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California

Shrubs And Trees

Under formative pruning may be included also the trimming up of clear stems in the case of trees which one desires to grow that way. This end may be accomplished gradually, though it is best to remove all the twigs that will have to come off eventually before they reach a thickness, at the trunk, of ½ inch, lest they leave needlessly large pruning wounds.
Corrective Pruning covers a number of operations like the prompt removal of all growths arising from the understocks of budded or grafted plants. These ought to be cut off at not above the point of their origin, as soon as they appear.

Also, the removal of all inward-growing branches in such shrubs as Flowering Crabapples; and of such branches as cross each other, as well as the control of all misplaced or misdirectedgrowths that tend to disfigure a shrub or tree. And the removal of so called water-shoots from trunks or main limbs, much as one would do in apple-trees.

Systematic Rejuvenation. Certain shrubs which flower on branches of the current or of the preceding summer's growth may be maintained at their highest pitch of performance and kept down, moreover, to less than their maximum proportions by means of systematic annual prunings which amount in effect to annual rejuvenation, practically the raising of a new shrub every summer from their base, with very little sacrifice of the characteristic beauty of the subject.

This is for many kinds of shrubs an ideal treatment, provided that it is practised annually, without lapses, from the start. But when it is suddenly put into effect upon old shrubs that have not been so treated every year, the results are likely to be somewhat ragged, unless one gives them an initial, drastic hacking back so as to produce practically a new shrub from their base.

Those kinds which flower on year old branches are pruned immediately upon completion of the flowering season, mostly from late May to mid-June or even earlier in the case of Forsythias and other very early-flowering subjects. The branches which have finished flowering are taken back to a mere fraction of their length—two or three or more of them being left somewhat longer so as to prevent an altogether too stubby appearance. From the base of the pruned stubs a vigorous growth will be produced during the summer, and on it will be staged the next spring's floral show. It is on this new growth that these shrubs produce their best flowers.

Among the shrubs that may be treated this way advantageously are the Forsythias, all of the early-flowering Spiraeas, Weigelas, Philadelphus, Deutzias, Buddleja alternifolia, Tamarix parviflora, and many more.

Those which flower on branches of the current summer's growth (mostly the mid- and late-summer-flowering kinds) should be pruned in the spring, before growth commences; and the pruning may be even more radical than with the preceding group.