Shape Up or Shrub Out

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Susan Mason

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Knowing when to prune is key. Many flowering shrubs bloom on second-year wood, so wait to prune them back until after their blooms fade for the season.

If you’ve got shrubs, you’ve got all kinds of reasons to prune: to control a shrub’s size, improve its shape, promote flowering and fruiting, remove dead or diseased stems, create a more open look or encourage a fuller, leafier appearance. And it’s your goal that will influence the type and timing of your pruning.

It certainly seems quite paradoxical that pruning a shrub can make it grow back thicker and bushier, but the principles that control a plant’s growth make this possible. You see, every branch has a growing bud at its tip, along with lateral buds lying along its stem. (Just run your finger over a bare branch in winter, and you’ll know what I mean.)

The bud at the tip of every branch is the dominant bud, having what is referred to as “apical dominance.” As long as a branch remains intact, the apical bud will grow steadily in a single burst. But if this branch is pruned back (removing the dominant bud), the latent buds below the cut will be invigorated, sprout and make a mass of new growth. So lightly pruning all of a shrub’s branches actually encourages a flush of new growth and makes its outer canopy grow more densely. These types of pruning cuts (which are made at a slight angle just above a lateral bud) are known as “heading cuts.”

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Pruning a shrub does more than neaten its outline – it controls and directs the shrub’s growth while allowing access to structures behind the planting, as well as promotes air circulation.

Repeated heading over the years can make some shrubs leggy, as the dense new growth on the plant’s outer canopy shades out the shrub’s interior. In such a case, thinning cuts can help open up the interior to more sunlight and make the shrub grow thicker throughout. Thinning cuts are similar to heading cuts, but they’re made by reaching deep into the plant’s interior and cutting out branches to open up the inside of the plant – or by cutting a branch all the way off at ground level. These thinning cuts are routinely used in rejuvenation pruning for deciduous shrubs and broad-leaved evergreens and, depending on the plant, are performed in fall (or in spring, at the end of the plant’s blooming period).

Just remember, shaping and training your shrubs is a continual process you can do throughout the growing season. For a little guidance, grab your bypass pruners and gloves, then take the steps shown in the following pictures and described in their captions. With a little work, you’ll have fuller, healthier shrubs in no time.

Warnings

For flowering shrubs that bloom on last year’s wood, wait to prune until the plant has finished blooming; otherwise, you won’t get any flowers for the season.
If you’re pruning out diseased wood, be sure to sanitize your cutting blades thoroughly before moving to new areas of the plant or to another part of your garden. You don’t want to spread the disease! When you’re finished pruning, discard all diseased branches in the garbage.

Tips

Only the outer perimeter of a hedge has growing foliage, so it’s important to prune back to the same point in each cycle. If you cut too deeply, you’ll expose bare branches that will take several seasons to fill in again.
After pruning, your shrub should have a distinct outline. All extra branches will have been cut, inner branches may have been removed, and the perimeter outline of the shrub should allow air and light to circulate to all parts of the plant.

Faqs

Q: My shrubs were planted too close together. How should I prune them?
A: This happens a lot in landscapes. As the shrubs mature, they’ll start to cross over one another. You can either cut back the growth until the shrubs are distinct, or keep them together and create an unbroken hedge when this takes place. If you choose to prune the shrubs back to individual forms, you’ll need to repeat the task regularly or consider removing (and transplanting) some shrubs to reduce the constant upkeep.
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