Pruning Is Not Instaworthy
But It Brings Epiphanies (For Me, At Least)
There’s really no way around it: Pruning isn’t pretty.
Not when you’re doing it at least.
That makes it hard to share on Instagram :)
The after doesn’t really look better than the before—until springtime—when it looks amazingly better.
And next winter, the structure changes you made are visible again and you smile with satisfaction that this plant is flourishing under your care.
Henry Cloud wrote about the difference between “hurt” and “harm.”
Not everything that hurts us harms us. In fact, sometimes hurt saves us from harm. It’s the very reason for pain, physiologically.
This can be helpful to keep in mind if pruning scares you.
The first hurdle to get over is accepting that cutting a plant is not harming it: It’s helping it.
The second hurdle is clearly to learn the basics so you do prune in a way that truly helps, and that is actually far simpler than you might think.
Generally, plants are resilient, and one mistake isn’t likely to kill it.
The habit of pruning.
I keep my pruners in my gardener’s smock by the door, and I put it on every time I walk out to the garden. Prune away dead, broken or diseased branches when you see them. If you have your hand pruners with you, you’ll prune in a timely manner.
This is also a seasonal habit to form. In late winter or very early spring, it’s time to prune trees and shrubs. You’ll eventually just feel that it’s time. But until that becomes your impulse, set a reminder for mid-winter (February is usually a good month) to walk around your property and look for plants that need pruning. If you don’t know what you’re looking for, Google “pruning basics.”
Excerpt from my zine “The Uncomplicated Gardener,” Good Printed Things 2024
Those basics include things like:
removing dead branches (anytime of year)
cutting healthy branches back when the plant is dormant to stimulate new growth
removing branches that cross over or rub against each other
removing branches of a tree growing inward towards the center instead of outward
pruning after flowering if it’s a flowering shrub and you actually want to see the flowers
avoiding the removal of more than 1/3 of the plant in a single season
You can likely find a YouTube video to cover how to prune any specific plant in question. Eventually, you’ll trust your instincts.
This week, I was pruning my panicle hydrangeas, something I was terrified to do until multiple sources confirmed it’s right. (My grandmother always said not to prune hydrangeas if you wanted blooms. Turns out, that’s only true with certain kinds.)
One thing I didn’t expect—and gosh, we never do—was finding that some of the branches I thought were healthy and that I had only planned to cut back a little were already dying from the inside out, black in the center of the branch instead of green, with no obvious damage from without.
Because my life epiphanies very often come in botanical metaphors, this floored me. I audibly said, “Wow,” to no one in particular.
Pruning is more than removing the clearly dead things, or investing in the future strength of healthy things: It also reveals dying things masquerading as flourishing. It forces what’s hiding to show itself.
Sometimes you prune something you think will bear more fruit, and it shows you it cannot.