On Earth Day, our team did a Day of Service at the Victory Junction Gang Camp. While there, we pruned trees and shrubs so they could flourish and provide enjoyment this season. Here’s a video on how you can prune your plants for that beautiful native look.
Pruning for a Beautiful Native Look
This is Jonathan Rigsbee, the TurfCommander. Today, we’re at Victory Junction for Earth Day providing some free time and effort to help them revitalize their plants and landscape. We often come across plants like these in our landscaping. This is Viburnum and as you see, it’s kind of unruly with some dead in it. There’s just not a lot of shape or structure to it. So I’m going to show you how to take something that’s a mess and turn it into something that’s functional & looks native while getting it ready for summer. In effect, pruning for that beautiful natural look.
The first thing that you want to do is stand back and look at the plant. Try to understand what the plant wants to do. This is a vase shaped plant. So the first thing we do is get all of the dead out – that’s going to leave what we have to work with so far as shape goes. Then, we can work on structure, shape and crossing branches.
Now the dead is out. We stand back and look at what this plant wants to do. You’ll notice this plant is leaning – it’s trying to find sunlight. If we don’t address this structural issue then, when we get an ice storm or a lot of rain you have the potential for it to break and then the plant may die and require removal.
One thing we wanted to pointed out, we found dead areas at the bottom that need to be sawed out. If we don’t take these areas out – they could be entry ways for insects and disease that may kill your plant. Take a few extra minutes and perform the details to keep your plant healthy. The next thing is work on the structure – take out some of the crossing branches, bring the back down a bit and start to get some shape to it.
As you can see, we’ve gone through all three plants – cleaned them up, cut some of the weight off so they aren’t leaning as much, identified all the dead wood and got it out, identified what we think are the best survivable stems. These look as good as these plants allow – given what we had as a basis.
The style of pruning we’re using is called staggering. As you can see, they’re staggering downward much like stair steps. This works really well for Andina, Viburnum and a lot of plants that are up against your foundation so you don’t have to put them in a box. We don’t make meatballs here at GrowinGreen. We like to prune for the natural effective plant and make look as it would in the woods.
If you have any questions – give us call at 1.866.LAWN HELP or check us out on the web at GrowinGreen.com.
