A common question – what get’s pruned and why?
Like most gardening answers, it depends. In general, we prune for one or more of the following reasons:
- To shape the plant that’s being pruned.
- The plant needs to be pruned for its health.
- The plant is overgrown and needs to be “tamed”.
Let’s start with plant health. In most cases, nature has developed a pruning methodology for each plant. Either ice storms, snow storms, wind, insects, disease, or severe cold will take a toll on different plants to different degrees. While this might be an OK result out in the wilderness, it rarely results in the look and feel we want in a garden.
As the steward of the plants in our garden, it’s up to us to replicate the benefits of natural pruning, but hopefully end up with more attractive results. This is where we come to the first reason for pruning – to end up with the shape we want in a plant.
As we shape the plant, we need to keep in mind what the plant needs for its health as well, so that we integrate the shaping we’re doing for our pleasure with the needs of the plant for its health. Most of the time, there’s no inherent conflict between the two objectives. I suspect this is because our minds eye has come to develop an appreciation for the natural state of plants, which is driven by those forces of nature that will prune if we don’t.
In the next posts, we’ll talk about how nature works, and how we need to work as garden stewards with pruning shears in our hands.
