Spring is probably the best time to ‘prune’ plant material in your garden, especially if your garden is a landscape garden.. I am about to give a demonstration for a dear client and friend of mine in her landscape garden Masteripiece installed about four or five years ago. The ‘show’ will be also attended by her neighbor. I shall have to rush.
The vast majority of homeowners nearly everywhere in these parts of the good old USA, pay little attention to the grounds which surround their homes, except for a shade tree (that’s typically too big), foundation planting, (that lineup of smooshed things that run along the front foundation of your dwelling and sometimes beyond, and lawn (that green stuff of which there is too much that homeowners nowdays pay others to mow.
Also fashionable for about the last fifty years is the planting of some woody plant shorter than an elm or maple somewhere in front with a circle of pavers or hostas ringing it, giving it the modern touch for simplicity of care.
Booze, drugs, and television are far more popular enterprises these days in our modern American culture than expressing ones self in the art of landscaping the home grounds…….grounds of which one pays taxes….the bigger the parcel, the pricier the tax in most communities.
If there are woody plants to be operated upon, it’s usually a guy chore; gals play with flowers if either appear caring for their grounds.
So many homeowners now never even personally shorten a blade of grass…….and their children are likely to think that a tomato is manufactured at the local super market.
Where would they learn otherwise?
It’s Spring, however, and if anyone in a city-area household is liable to snoop aroung their grounds, it will be now. While observing, the astute homeowner will snoop with a pruning shears, a loppers, and a hedge shears on hand; pruners in the pocket with the other two garden weapons in a sturdy wheel barrow accompanying the caretaker’s travels.
Since the pruner person is likely a guy, his instinct to prune is excited solely because it is Spring, and the sun is shining on the one day of the years he is programmed to do this yearly task.
Whoever the pruning artist might be, the first questions asked before anything is clipped should be:
“Why am I pruning what, and how should I prune and why?
Pruning without knowledge can definitely shorten the life span of the plant pruned.
Grouping the Plant Material:
Herbaceous perennials….and annuals: Gals usually handle this category as mentioned above. Pruning plants in this group, herbaceous meaning non-woody, are usually: removing the dead material of the perennial’s past year’s spent growth to be done either in late autumn or early spring, or , if necessary the removal of the annual, for the entire annual plant is dead by winter………These prunings are both done for clean up by getting rid of the dead stuff.
I prefer to prune back my perennials in spring rather than the previous fall, because the dead foliage in autumn helps capture snow to provide cover from any exceptionally bitter winter where there has been nearly no snowfall. The usual winds of that time of the year spend all Fall blowing oak, maple leaves and other loose garden debris which naturally collect at the crowns of plants where the perennials foliage is still standing becoming a mulch adding insulation to the crown and roots protecting the plant from winter kill.
We, at Masterpiece do offer clean up services and professional pruning both the practical, the healthy and artistic . Call us at 952-933-5777 for more information.
Woody Plants….trees and shrubs…will be continued…I have to attend my pruning class.