FREE online courses on Vegetable Gardening - Pruning - Pruning Shrubs

 

Before pruning a shrub, you also first decide what you want your cuts to accomplish.

As with trees, you should remove any dead or crossing branches. And most shrubs do require occasional thinning, especially the older ones.

 

When you thin a shrub, you remove the oldest branches right down to the ground. That opens the center of the shrub to sunlight, encouraging new branch growth and increased leaf production throughout the shrub.

 

The key is to remove those branches totally. Many homeowners never really thin their shrubs, relying instead on periodic shearing of the branch ends.

 

That encourages heavy leaf production at the branch ends, which prevents adequate leaf production inside the shrub and results in leggy shrubs with long bare stems and dense surface growth.