I get lots of calls in the winter about pruning and my first question is usually to determine the reason for pruning.  If I know why, I can usually come up with how.   One of the reasons to prune is for the health of the plant.  And that usually justifies my suggestion that the first rule of pruning is to remove the 3-Ds – anything Dead, Diseased, or Damaged.

A portion of a plant can die without the entire plant dying.  If it’s dead, it looks bad; and it will not be alive again.  It baffles me why dead material is not removed.  There’s a lot of it obvious out there resulting from the extremes of last year’s weather.  If you don’t remove the dead material, decaying organisms, or the pathogen that killed it in some cases, usually continue moving into live tissue resulting in more dead plant material.  So it’s also a good idea to remove diseased material sooner rather than later.

Damaged plant parts often serve as a point of entry for insect or disease problems.  Damage may result from handling during planting, deer rubbing, dogs fighting, wind, cars, children playing, or any number of other causes.  

Why would I not remove the 3-Ds?  In some cases the disease or damage is located on a major trunk and removing it would be equal to removing the plant.  The plant will probably have to be removed eventually.  But sometimes, we may enjoy it for another year or two before its final demise.  A reason to keep diseased plant parts would be if I needed material for clinical diagnosis.  On the other hand, if I don’t know the cause of a problem, pruning it out gives me a benchmark.  If it comes back and gets worse, then I need to gather more information.  If it doesn’t come back, then I’ve solved the problem. 

So, how do we know what is dead or not dead out there.  I can tell you up front that there are a lot of needle bearing evergreens, conifers such as Leyland cypress, that have a lot of dead stems.  From the highway, I don’t know if the death resulted from drought or disease or both or something else.   Doesn’t matter.  It’s dead, and the plants will look better when the pruning is done.

When conifers have stems with no green tissue, that stem will not be alive again.  It does not have the latent buds to provide new shoots.  It needs to be pruned at least as far back as green foliage.  In many cases it needs to be pruned back to the next larger stem or trunk.  These plants include in addition to the Leyland cypresses, all the junipers and arbor vitae.

For broadleaf plants, those whose leaves are not needles or scales, we can often determine if the stem is alive by scratching the bark.  Beneath the bark of live stems is a healthy green cambium layer.  If that layer is brown, the stem is dead.  Prune till you get to green tissue.  Sometimes you can get an idea by bending the twigs or stems.  Dead stems break readily; live ones tend to bend first.  And of course, the answer will eventually reveal itself with spring.  Dead stems will not grow leaves; live ones will.  If you need to wait that long, it’s a sure way to tell.

But there are a lot of leylands out there that would look better if they were pruned on one of these mild winter days.  In some cases they will look better when they are pruned at ground level.  But that’s your call.

alcooke

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