A GROWING CONCERN: Good pruning practices are evergreen

I HAVE BEEN pruning evergreens now for the last two weeks at a fever pitch! That is because late November and all of December is the ideal time to prune your conifers and softwoods. And the trimmings then become the perfect byproduct to make swags, wreaths, holiday table arrangements and to decorate those empty pots and flower beds.

So since the weather has been so wonderful and is predicted to stay above freezing for the next 10 days, let’s revisit “evergreen advice for conifer pruning.”

First, in the pruning world, there are only two techniques: Heading cuts, which sever across the plant part just above a node and promote new and numerous growths there, and thinning cuts, which sever a plant stem or branch exactly at the point of origin and stops growth there — promoting remaining tips to grow more vigorously. An understanding of these two techniques is vital because improper heading cuts on conifers can be devastating.

Remember, December is an ideal time to prune your softwood evergreens, along with the fact that those trimmings are very valuable in the autumn/winter garden — especially for seasonal holiday displays.

Let’s get back to how devastating heading cuts can be to your evergreens. The problem with heading cuts in relationship to your conifers is twofold.

First, when you tip evergreens (heading tips performed on the growing tips of evergreen branches), they become very dense. It is exactly how Christmas trees are produced. But Christmas trees are cut down and thrown away very young in their lives, which is good because tipping your evergreens not only causes them to become very dense, but these new tips will compete to become the new terminal tip (growth tip) of that main branch or side branch. This in turn will create a weird, medusa-headed growth pattern. Down the road, this would become a constant pruning challenge.

Second (as if the first is not bad enough), heading off deep into the plant’s growth (that growth is the woody brown, harder and older than 18 to 24 months) most often will result in no new growth at all. In fact, even if needles and small interior branches are present, they will die off in the next two years (think dead plant walking).

This is why that house you see with the dead, ugly, brown evergreens that they pruned back hard out of the driveway and back from the sidewalk is every bit as poor looking today as it was five years ago when they pruned it hard, heading-off branches deep into established wood. Most all evergreens simply will not branch off old wood when headed-off.

Thinning cuts are the name of the game as far as evergreens are concerned. Actually, the best pruning of evergreens is planting them far enough away from the house, driveway, sidewalk or garage that you only have to shape prune and deadwood.

Dead-wooding, by the way, is a perfect way to greatly improve the look of your conifers. At any time of year, you can dead-wood your trees — all of your trees. It is an easy process that simply involves removing, with mostly thinning cuts, all dead or dying plant parts usually found deep inside the plant along the trunk or in close proximity to it.

Dead-wooding dramatically improves the look of the plant as well as its health, opening up to both air and light.

If junipers or heather are invading the driveway, pick up the tip and thin it back at a fork of the plant’s growth. That will remove the offending length that is in an improper place, but do so with thinning cuts only.

If you must head off at several times on an evergreen pruning job, you must execute heading cuts.

Remember the steadfast rule: all heading cuts beget future thinning cuts because of the multitude of new growth that radiates from that prune. All heading cuts, on all plants, beget future thinning cuts or they will suffer the wrath of a medusa-headed end growth.

Do not forget as well that lower branches thinned off the trunk or branches thinned out of a thicket of branches, and cut off at the trunk, are all advantageous thinning cuts as far as evergreens are concerned.

But above all else … stay well all, and have a great holiday season!

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Andrew May is a freelance writer and ornamental horticulturist who dreams of having Clallam and Jefferson counties nationally recognized as “Flower Peninsula USA.” Send him questions c/o Peninsula Daily News, P.O. Box 1330, Port Angeles, WA 98362, or email news@peninsuladailynews.com (subject line: Andrew May).