Pruning for health

Sometime between late February and the end of March - depending on how Spring is coming along - bushes and shrubs can need pruning and dead growth from the previous season needs clearing. While days of cold may remain, new life is readying itself for the coming season. 

Pruning is one of the activities in the garden we use in our therapeutic horticulture classes to encourage insights into living and healing.  It is a gardening activity with parallels that can be applied to our personal lives.

In the same way that we look at a bush before making decisions about cutting branches to help it thrive, we can examine the branches in our lives.

It is also something that calls for deliberative care – mindfully looking at the plant now, thinking about the cuts it needs, and imagining how it might look later in the season, in full bloom. That process, aside from the physical activity of being in the garden, can be of benefit.

So what is pruning?

In short, pruning is the selective removal of branches from a tree, bush or shrub. It differs from trimming, in which shears or a trimmer helps maintain a shape – like keeping a hedge square.

Plants need pruning for a variety of reasons. The main reasons are for plant health, to shape it to the space it is in, and to encourage fresh, vigorous growth and more flowers.

Horticulturists will tell you that botanically, pruning has physical impacts on the apical dominance of the plant, the genetic programming that tells the plant to grow upward. Botanical research has focused on the plant hormone, auxin, in which the growing tip suppresses the growth of axillary buds below. The shoot tip on the end of a stem inhibits the outgrowth of buds further down the stem to control the number of growing shoot tips and branches. This enables the plant to concentrate its resources in growing taller, with the side effect of shading out competitors. When the terminal bud – the tip of the plant – is removed, it allows the buds that have been suppressed further down the stem to be able to grow. Because of this, pruning can stimulate a lot of new growth that has been suppressed.
This means that plants that later in the season like roses and butterfly bushes – both of which I have in the garden – will flower on the lower buds, instead of just the tip.

Trimming and deadheading later in the season – essentially, maintenance -- can also produce an additional flush of flowers, but that’s another topic, entirely. Pruning of plants with variegated or colorful foliage show their best color and patterning on young growth. Pruning keeps their foliage vivid and showy.

Pruning calls for looking with care at the plant before taking sharp tools to it. Every cut will alter the plant. Some principles to bear in mind before one begins:

Vigor – Because pruning stimulates new growth production, ask: how much new growth do we want to see, and why. How much of the plant, how many branches, or is it just a question of pinching off suckers in an area of a plant?

Shape - Plants live in place – unless they’re in pots – and may need to be kept in shape to best fill the place they were planted for. Or, they may have grown out of balance because of shade or wind, or because you have a particular style in mind that you are looking for. Ask yourself – what should this plant look like at the end of season, or if you’re looking further ahead, in a few years’ time.

Size – Small gardens may not tolerate a large specimen, or it may need pruning to prevent it outgrowing the yard or into a neighbor’s. I planted several filberts – or hazelnuts as they’re also known – under power lines, knowing that they will need to be kept in check. Cutting for size will allow for easier harvesting and won’t threaten the powerlines in a storm.

Light – Plants are phototropic. That is, they are adapted to produce the sugars that feed them through photosynthesis from exposure to light. By shaping how much light – and air – can reach interior areas once the plant leafs out contributes to the overall health of the plant. Pruning trees can also affect how much light reaches the understory and depending on whether you need more light or less for the type of garden you’re planting below can affect how they will grow.

Health - Spending time in the garden throughout the year will allow you to see diseased, injured, dying, or dead branches, at which time you can act – the stitch in time philosophy. But pruning provides an annual opportunity to closely check in with your plants individually and help them thrive. Branches that touch and rub should be pruned, choosing one or both for removal, depending on all the factors you consider when pruning. Giving the branches on the plant space to grow into is also essential, or the growth that will occur will be unhealthy because it becomes stifling.

Horticultural therapy stems from the understanding that humans evolved in nature and at a deep-seated level, are at home in nature and benefit from exposure to it and being in it.

To help a plant thrive before beginning to prune calls for looking closely at the plant, where it is in the garden and seeing how it is doing. It calls for examination. Getting down on your knees, looking at the base, stepping back and looking at its overall size. Which branches are well, which are tangled? Where is the new growth, which branches are looking tired or growing in the wrong direction? How does the plant fit in with the plants around it, and how might it look at the end of the season?

As with most of the activities we use in HT, gardening activities have parallels within our lives and the slow, steady pace of change in a garden affords us the time and space to find a safe way to look within.

As we examine a plant prior to pruning, the questions we ask that will shape the decisions on whether to cut a branch from the plant entirely, part way up the stem, just the end, or leave in place are similar to the same questions we can ask during a self examination. If our lives are without space for new growth, what is needed to help us thrive? How extensive are the changes needed? Pruning without a plan or vision is destructive and can kill a plant or stunt it severely, so what principles should be applied when considering change?

And aside from the internal dialogue that takes place during pruning, it’s also actually good physical exercise. Kneeling on a pad for an hour while reaching between branches with a pair of clippers, bending under overarching branches, lifting and twisting the cuttings into a bucket, then standing and moving to empty the bucket into a pile before returning to our spot beneath the bush, is likely to test muscles that visits to the gym don’t. Since pruning is a slow and deliberate process, it’s more akin to yoga, but for someone not used to this type of activity, is likely to be felt the next morning – in a good way.

At the end of pruning a bush, you’ll be left with a plant well-shaped and ready for the coming year, but also a pile of cuttings. Those cuttings provide biomass for mulch or compost, but they also provide the stems that can be used for replanting many new plants, which is another of the classes we will cover. As with all life, very little is wasted in a garden.