What decorative plants NOT to Prune in early Spring!

Gardens are extremely busy right now with so much burgeoning growth, and so much to do! With the fine weather it is a great opportunity to get out and get some gardening done. However, it's easy to get carried away in the heat of the moment and potentially damage some of your plants. Here are some simple pointers:

Firstly, what not to prune:

Anything that flowers early (i.e. before midsummer) should not be pruned until after it flowers, which means you will not enjoy flowers this year, and it will upset the plant's natural rhythm. If you look at the plant you can often see the flower buds beginning to form if it is coming into flower reasonably soon.

Deciduous trees, with some exceptions, should not be pruned until they are dormant over the winter. Rhododendrons should be coming into flower soon and shouldn't be pruned until late Spring.

Ok, so what can I prune?

If there are dead flowers still hanging on from last year, and no flowerbeds apparent then you should be pretty safe. Arbutus, Hydrangeas & woody Salvias are at the top of my list right now, together with Hypericums and many Hebes & Viburnums will have just finished flowering too.

How to prune...?

There's a ton of plants that can be sheared all over (similar to trimming a hedge), but this is definitely not the case for every plant! Quite a lot of plants really suffer, and look pretty goofy too, if they're trimmed evenly all over. For these plants you should use the 'selective' pruning method, sometimes called the 'grab & snip method', pruning each branch or twig individually, keeping the overall balance and appearance of the plant in mind with every cut of the secateurs. Unsure which method to choose? This article is a bit short to be really getting into that, but if you're in front of a shrub trying to decide whether to use selective or shearing, it's best to default to selective pruning and you're unlikely to do any damage.

How to start with Selective Pruning:

The best way to begin is DDDW (Dead, Diseased, Dying & Wrong Way). Prune out dead stems first, then diseased & dying stems and then prune out anything growing the wrong way. By wrong way I mean branches that are crossing each other, overly congested... or if you just don't like the direction the twig/branch is growing, prune it out! So long as you don't reduce the foliage mass by more than 20 percent or so you should be reasonably safe!

There's a little bit more to it than this, and a whole industry of literature to explore further, but you should be able to get a good amount done in your garden with these simple pointers. Let's cross our fingers and hope the weather stays as good as it has the last couple of weeks!