Early to mid-June is the best time to be pruning your evergreens.

Pruning seems to be one of the most frustrating and the most misunderstood areas of gardening. The longevity of a plant is determined by how well it has been pruned over the years.

It is always best to prune your conifers yearly to stay within the size and scale of most landscapes.

The biggest mistake people make is they wait until the shrub has overgrown its space and then they try to hack it back to keep it smaller. Let it be said that “hacking” is never a proper pruning technique.

Evergreens come in all different shapes and sizes – spreading, rounded, upright, pyramidal and weeping. The natural branching pattern of the plant dictates its shape.

By respecting this inherent form when pruning, it is possible to limit the size of the plant without changing its form. Not only does this preserve the plant’s true beauty, but it saves the expense of replacing overgrown plants.

Do not buy a pyramidal-shaped plant thinking that you can keep it pruned into a globe shape. You will just have a very unhappy looking globe. You need to work with its natural shape.

Here are some things that you need to understand before you start pruning your evergreens:

There are two main goals when pruning evergreens:

Control Size of the Plant

We usually choose the plants we do because we are attracted to the natural shape of it.

When it comes to pruning them, though, we will take our shears and cut the tips of each branch to the same length. If this is how you are pruning, you will find that in a couple years all your plants have the same dense blob-like form.

You will have lost that character of the plant that first attracted you to it.

To keep a more natural look, make individual cuts with the secateurs and not with the shears. This is called natural pruning.

That means you are making selective cuts to thin or reduce the overall size of the plant. This cannot be done with shears, but with secateurs or loppers.

It means cutting one stem at a time and not just shearing off the tips. When pruning is completed, it should look like no cuts have been made; It should still have its natural form.

The other goal of pruning evergreens is to maintain a shape such as a hedge, pyramid, globe form or specialty shapes like spirals and pompons.

This is best achieved by shearing. With shearing you are just removing new tip growth, creating a full dense look. Even though electric shears make the job easier, hand shears make a much nicer job of things.

Electric shears just tear the plant tissue while hand shears make a cleaner cut. When the plant tissue is torn there is more die back at the tips, giving the sheared shrub a brownish cast.

To prevent this from happening, always make sure any pruning tool is sharp and clean. To achieve a more formal, sheared, geometric look shear up to three-quarters of the newest growth each year.

This way you are only allowing it to grow, say, an inch per year instead of four inches per year.

Joanne Young is a Niagara-on-the-Lake garden expert and coach. See her website at joanneyoung.ca

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