Early Season Gardening

When you can’t wait to get started in the spring garden, a good task to undertake is pruning. Most trees and shrubs benefit from annual pruning. It keeps them in shape, gets rid of dead and diseased wood and encourages new growth. But not all trees and shrubs should be pruned early—early spring bloomers set their flower buds the fall before. Pruning them early in the spring would mean losing some blossoms. Most of the time this is not what you want. However there are exceptions. It’s often easier to prune when you can see the shape of the plant, before the branches have leaves on them. Trees and shrubs that need shaping could sacrifice a few blossoms for a spring pruning.

The trees that can be pruned early are those that have flower buds on the new growth made this year (called first year wood). These trees generally bloom later in the season, beginning in late June or July.

Many trees you may have in your yard can be pruned in early spring, while they’re still dormant, they include: Bradford Pear, Butterfly Bush, Crape Myrtle, Flowering Dogwood, Flowering Plum, Glossy Abelia, Golden Rain Tree, Honeysuckle, Potentilla, Redbud, and Spirea.

If you prune an early spring bloomer, the budded branches can be cut and put indoors, which brings the feel of spring right into the house. The closer to outdoor blooming time a branch is cut, the faster it will flower indoors.

Telling the difference between a vegetative bud (leaves) and a flowering bud is easy. Flowering buds are much fatter. If there are three buds on a branch tip and the center one is larger than the other two, it is a flowering bud.