Pruning Your Trees and Shrubs

Pruning is an essential and relatively simple landscaping task that can help shape your plants, improve their health and maintain the beauty of your landscape. It also helps protect people and property from a tree’s falling limbs during storms, and reduces the potential for disease and pests to spread from dead or unhealthy plant parts to living plant parts.

In some cases, pruning is the only way to restore a diseased or damaged plant. In other cases, it’s the best way to encourage a plant to bear more flowers and fruit. Pruning can correct mistakes in planting (such as planting a tree that is too large for its site), and it’s often the only way to manage the size of some evergreens, such as arborvitae, yew and hemlock.

When you prune a plant, you remove dead or diseased branches and limbs and those that are growing too close to structures, power lines or other plants. You can also remove those that obstruct views or limit access to pedestrians and vehicles. Pruning is important to the overall health of a tree or shrub, since it promotes airflow through the canopy, limits the occurrence of diseases and pests, and stimulates the formation of new, healthy growth.

Most deciduous trees and many shrubs benefit from being pruned during late winter or early spring, before they start their new growth. This allows them to heal quickly from the pruning cuts and reduces the risk of cold damage at the points of the cuts. In addition, certain flowering trees (azaleas, lilacs, tulips and peonies) and most evergreens (including holly, laurel, hemlock, yew and arborvitae) are best pruned right after they finish blooming to avoid removing flower buds that will affect future blossoms.

Branches that rub against each other or those that grow at a sharp angle to the trunk can chafe, create an entry point for insects and disease and limit the flow of water and oxygen through the tree. You should also remove crossing branches and those that grow inward toward the center of the crown.

Some plants may require more frequent pruning, such as evergreens that are being used to form hedges. These can be sheared or topped with shears during the summer to control their size and form.

source https://ontimetreelopping.wordpress.com/2025/01/27/pruning-your-trees-and-shrubs-2/