Healthy garden
Pruning shrubs, the hard way by Michelle Sutton
I ABOVE: Rhodies are touchy but most will come back slowly from hard pruning. Photo by Michelle Sutton INSET: Get out the loppers for some hard pruning in March and early April. Photo by Larry Decker
20 | MARCH-APRIL 2014
f shrubs are engulfing your house, their stems all a-tangle, or your forsythia is the size of a minivan, you may consider drastic pruning. At the right time of year, you can prune certain hopelessly overgrown shrubs back hard—I mean, hard, like to within a foot or two of the ground. Hard pruning gives you a chance to start over. In upstate New York, I generally do hard pruning somewhere between mid March and early April, before the shrub’s buds break. In late winter/very early spring, before any new growth gets underway, a deciduous shrub’s root system is stocked up on food (carbohydrates yielded by photosynthesis). That stored energy is available to send up a bunch of vibrant new shoots after you cut the shrub back. I asked Lee Ginenthal, owner of DerRosenmeister fine rose nursery in Ithaca (derrosenmeister.com), to weigh in on hard pruning considerations like timing. He uses a phenological approach. “I used to try to give folks a specific time on the calendar for hard pruning,” he says, “but that’s become much harder with our freaky weather.
What’s worked better for me is noting when the forsythia buds are starting to show some yellow—that’s when I know it’s time to hard prune.” Ginenthal has hard pruned many different species of shrubs, but in the rose arena specifically, he recommends hard pruning overgrown shrub roses and ramblers, but not climbing roses—they don’t stand for it. It can be scary the first time we cut something back this hard, but when we are faced with that forsythia minivan, what do we have to lose? It looks terrible now, and it’s only getting bigger. “Along with hard pruning, I ask people to consider ‘shovel pruning’ as an option,” Ginenthal says. “Sometimes shrubs are just planted in the wrong place. What I love the most about shovel pruning is the opportunity to plant something new!” Some shrubs love the hard pruning treatment, others tolerate it but are slow to rebound, and others will just not come back. You have to consider each species of shrub individually. Look up your species in a fine resource like The American Horticultural Society’s Pruning & Training: A