The Ever Curious Gardener by Lee Reich

Author:Lee Reich
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: New Society Publishers
Published: 2018-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

Questioning the advice to put the brakes on tree growth with summer pruning

“Prune when the knife is sharp” goes an old saw. Not true. (But it’s never a good idea to prune if the knife is not sharp.) How a plant responds to pruning depends not only on how much is cut off, but also on when the operation is done. The usual advice about pruning woody trees, shrubs, and vines, including that offered above, concerns pruning them in “winter,” which is anytime that they are dormant and, in the case of those that are deciduous plants, leafless. How about pruning at other times?

Sometimes, trees, shrubs, and vines grow very well, too well in fact, so that their stems are crying out to be pruned. Enter summer pruning, often recommended as a better way than winter pruning to quell over-exuberant growth.

In the heat of the latter part of summer, woody plants should be getting ready to prepare for winter. Peering at some shoots of, say, a crabapple after midsummer, I see that rather than unfolding new leaves at their tips, their terminal buds just sit there, fattening up. The plant’s energies have been directed to making shoots thicker and more woody, not longer. Food energy is being stored up in their stems, trunks, and roots, energy that will be needed the following season to fuel early growth of new shoots and leaves, until new leaves are mature enough to not only feed themselves but also to export food to other parts of the plant.

Although summer pruning generally is not—not!—a good idea, it does have a place in gardening. The deep red color of a ripe apple (a variety that ripens to red) needs a direct hit of sunlight; removing some stems in summer to allow fruits to bathe in increased sunlight results in prettier apples. Don’t count on sunlight to paint the ripe color on every kind of fruit, though; plums, cherries, and grapes color up when ripe whether or not the fruits themselves bathe in light.

Removing a few stems here and there on any plant in summer also lets air in among remaining stems, leaves, and fruits, helping them to dry more quickly following rain or dew and so lessening the threat of disease. Even clipping off just a few leaves, sometimes recommended near clusters of grapes, can be beneficial in this way.

But all this summer pruning is not absolutely necessary. More judicious dormant pruning, such as cutting away enough branches on an apple tree to let the sun shine in on all the remaining ones, might obviate the need for summer pruning.

Some styles of growing plants necessitate summer pruning by their very nature. Hedges, for example. My privet or yew hedges can’t keep their shapes without being pruned repeatedly from early spring right through summer. Espaliers need summer pruning so that the tracery of their stems remains decoratively prominent and each of those geometrically trained branches is thoroughly clothed in fruits as well as in leaves.

And yes, there

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