Whether you are a keen gardener with the greenest of thumbs, or just starting out on your gardening journey, if you want a healthy, beautiful, and thriving garden, pruning is a vital skill to learn.
Pruning is an important gardening practice that can help to maintain the health, shape, and productivity of plants, as well as improve their appearance. This applies to many plants; from trees to shrubs and other plants and flowers.
What is Pruning?
At its most basic level, pruning is what we call the task of cutting back or removing certain parts of a plant, such as branches, stems, or leaves. Critical for garden health, without proper pruning, your shrubs, bushes, trees, and plants will not have the maintenance and support they need to thrive.
Knowing when to prune, depending on the season and temperature, and how to prune, for example, when to just give a light trim and when to really cut it back, is important for any garden proud homeowner.
Benefits of Pruning?
Pruning is important for several reasons. Critically, because, when done incorrectly, it can have a serious impact on the health, look and growth of your plants. At worst, improper pruning can kill a plant altogether or permanently stunt its growth. Some of the many benefits of pruning include:
Promote Growth
Firstly, it can help to promote the growth of new branches, leaves, and flowers. By removing dead, damaged, or diseased parts of a plant, you can encourage new growth and help the plant to remain healthy and productive. Pruning fruit trees encourages increased productivity and improves growth rates season upon season. In other hedges and shrubs, it increases growth by encouraging new shoots, helping plants grow taller and stronger. And in flowering plants, pruning improves growth and makes sure that they will continue to flower.
Prevent Disease
Pruning can be strategically applied to remove any parts of the plant that are dead, damaged, or infected with disease. This helps to prevent the spread of disease or pests to other parts of the plant and allows the plant to focus its energy on healthy growth. While cutting it right back may sometimes be needed and not look great – it will be worth it to save it in the long run.
Aesthetics
No one likes an untidy bush… straggly, overgrown hedges and plants make the entire garden look untidy and un-cared for, while shaped, maintained plants give the whole garden a lift! Pruning can be used to train and control plants to help them grow to the desired size, hight and shape to suit your garden design. From shrubs that are pruned into round balls or vines that are trained to grow in the right directions, pruning will definitely improve the astheics of your garden.
Safety
Especially important in winter, pruning also allows you to remove dead or heavy branches and limbs which might otherwise fall and injure unsuspecting passersby. From risks of strong winds or heavy rains, or very dry periods where dead branches grow brittle, careful pruning
keeps your garden safe. It also helps to deter pests or vermin by eliminating potential breeding grounds or hiding places for pests, and increasing air circulation can make it more difficult for them to thrive. Additionally, pruning can help to prevent branches from touching nearby structures, which can provide a pathway for pests to enter your home or garden.
Protects Property
Not just increasing garden safety for people, pruning helps protect your property from falling limbs on cars or your house, prevent branches scratching windows or car paint, and even stop branches or heavy leaves from clogging up your drains causing more work.
Thick and overgrown shrubs can even collect dirt and create mould/scum patches on the edges of paths or driveways that take pressure cleaning or heavy scrubbing to remove. It’s always better to keep things tidy and under control.
Improve light
Some of your other plants or even lawn might suffer if your garden isn’t pruned back regularly. Thick or tall growth can reduce sunlight from getting to the lower areas and plants in your garden, reducing their health and growth chances by limiting their sun and air intake. Pruning decreases the competition between your plants for the nutrients they need to thrive.
Successful Pruning
The key point to understand about pruning is that the new growth stimulated by pruning develops close to where the cut is made. The bud at the end of a branch, called the terminal bud, releases growth hormones that suppress buds along the branch length, lateral buds, from growing. Making the cut close to another bud minimizes regrowth to that one, single bud. It will then start to grow, becoming the new terminal bud. This reduces sucker growth.