Meatballs or Marvelous?

With warmer temperatures expected this weekend, many of us will be outside enjoying the sun and sprucing up the yard. This is a great time to prune; especially evergreen plants such as Hollies, Abelia, Boxwoods and Camellia Sasanqua.

You can prune your plants to shape them, remove leggy shoots of growth, remove dead wood and reduce the size. When pruning it is necessary to remove branches and stems from the inside of the plant to allow for air movement and sunlight to reach the inner foliage. If you don’t prune some of the inside branches, you will end up with a shell of green leaves and bare inner branches.

Pruning plants should always be selective versus shearing with hedge trimmers. Repeated shearing will damage the plant and cause leaves to grow only on the outermost branches. Not a pretty sight. Plants should not look like meatballs or boxes. Cutting an evergreen plant back now will help keep it the right height and shape once spring growth begins.

Don’t be tempted to prune spring flowering plants like forsythia, azaleas and spirea. Cutting these plants will remove the branches that bear new blooms, and you won’t see those marvelous splashes of yellow, pink and purple that signal the beginning of Spring.

Still not sure where to start? Visit our website or give us a call. Let our team of professionals assist you with all of your landscaping needs.

Now go dig out those gardening gloves and let’s go play in the dirt!