Tag Archives: drastic pruning

Needs must when drastic pruning is required

We generally prefer to lift, limb and encourage the natural form of a plant like this mature Camellia ‘Tiny Princess’ but it isn’t always possible.

We carry out a lot of pruning in our garden but not a whole lot of drastic, hard pruning to reduce a plant to juvenility. Generally, we like to celebrate maturity in plants and to shape or clip to bring out their natural form if required. But sometimes there are plants that are beyond that and drastic action is needed because they have lost what ornamental merit they had.

I was delighted to find some perfect blooms on a specimen of Camellia ‘Mimosa Jury’ on a former nursery stock plant this season but it is many years since the original plant in the garden has looked like this.

So it is with some of the original camellias bred by Felix Jury, some of which are now household names. We regard the original plants as having some intrinsic value simply because they are the very first one but there comes a time when they can lack any aesthetic merit, especially these days when camellia petal blight has robbed them even of pretty flowers. In particular, ‘Mimosa Jury’, ‘Waterlily’ and ‘Softly’ had reached for the sky and left nothing but bare legs and messy, blighted blooms and aborted buds visible at ground level.

What remains of Camellia ‘Softly’ after a brutal prune but we expect it to recover. It must have been at least six metres tall last week.
That is Zach, to the left of the blue circle, taking down ‘Mimosa Jury’ which was taller than the one still standing behind. In front is the mountain of material taken off already.

A word of warning: we have a fairly long season when we can do this sort of extreme pruning – late winter through spring is best, so August to October. We can get away with going into November this year because spring has been a little late and we get regular rain. It really is too late and risky for people in climates who are staring down the barrel of a long, dry, hot summer which may start very soon. Your plant may just sigh and die rather than springing into fresh growth.

This specimen of Camellia ‘Tiny Star’ had become leggy and way too tall to appreciate the dainty blooms. It was cut back very hard indeed two years ago so has just put on its third season of fresh growth and should be as pretty as a picture in flower next spring.

You can cut back to ground level with camellias and they will grow again but you get a thicket of young shoots and no form to the plant. We prefer to cut off to anywhere between a metre up to three metres, depending on the situation, so that the plant will look established again quickly. If we can, we will leave a few wispy branches that still have leaves on them, even if we trim them off later when the new growths have appeared. In this case, ‘Softly’ is back to bare wood while ‘Mimosa’ has a few thin branches with leaves. We shape the remaining trunks and branches, often reducing them to a strong central leader and maybe five or seven branches from that leader.

When I say reestablish ‘quickly’, I mean two years. The plants will push out new shoots this season and bush out again next growing season but they won’t flower and look lush until they have that second growing season behind them so into the third flush of new growth. Patience is a virtue in gardening.

As is our usual practice, we deal with the waste by retrieving what is suitable for firewood and putting the leafy and twiggy remains through the chipper to use as mulch.

The bare branches of an established plant of ‘Velvet and Cream’ – an extreme example of getting a decent shaped plant out of it after we failed to train it adequately from the start.

You can do this style of extreme pruning on michelias, too and we have reduced a M. laevifolia ‘Velvet and Cream’ to a leafless frame this week as well but you do need to start with a strong growing, healthy specimen. If it is not growing vigorously, it is may die. If you are wondering about hard pruning a michelia (botanically magnolias these days), there are more before and after photos over time here from an earlier effort on another specimen.

Work has stopped until the babies fledge and fly. Then, sadly, it is farewell to Picea albertiana ‘Conica’.

Some plants are beyond rescue. Work has stopped, temporarily, on the Picea albertiana ‘Conica’ in the rockery. It was once a fine specimen of admirable size and form. It was also kept in good health because Mark sprayed it for red spider once a year. As it grew larger, it became harder to spray and Mark – He Who Used To Do All The Spraying here – became increasingly reluctant to routinely spray to keep plants healthy. We decided that good environmental practice was more important than keeping inappropriate plants alive in the garden. In the years since he stopped spraying, the red spiders have pretty much taken over and the tree has gone into serious decline, as well as developing a pronounced lean. Time for it to go.

Cutting down has stopped because what remains houses a bird’s nest with babies. It may just be a common old blackbird but we are not willing to knowingly kill a family simply because we want to finish a task. Completion can wait a little longer until the branches are no longer occupied.

Talking of birds, Mama Thrush is bringing Zach and me delight although Ralph the dog is not so appreciative. She built her nest in the grapevine that grows beneath the verandah on the front of our shed which happens to be our main seating area when Lloyd and Zach are here at work. Her early anxieties appear to have faded and she has become accustomed to humans below. We can co-exist.

Mama Thrush’s nest outlined in blue – sheltered from the weather but taking a few chances on the humans nearby.

Drastic pruning

Magnolia laveifolia (formerly Michelia yunnanensis) was alive with bees in the spring sunshine. Many very busy bees

I took this photo on Thursday morning when the joy of a blue sky and bright sun made the whole world seem a better place. I admit that feeling was brief. An hour later, it clouded over, the temperature dropped and then it rained, remaining patchy rain, cloud and sun for the rest of the day. Such is a typical spring day here in the antipodes. Our weather is very changeable.

But how pretty is Magnolia laevifolia? You may know it – as we used to when it first became available in Aotearoa New Zealand and we produced it commercially in the nursery – as Michelia yunnanensis. I think it is still widely sold by that earlier classification but genetic testing moved all michelias into the magnolia group.

This specimen only ever gets an occasional tidy-up of wayward branches

This particular one is named ‘Velvet and Cream’ and is a selection made and released by Peter Cave, back in the early 1990s. There are countless other named selections around, both in this country and overseas because this is a plant species that sets prolific amounts of seed. For a while it seemed as though every man, woman and their dog had named a selection. Even Mark picked one out – more honey coloured than cream or white and he named it ‘Honey Velvet’.

We have two reasonably prominent plants of ‘Velvet and Cream’ and after a period of time, they are both attractive small trees. As far as we can remember, both were planted maybe 25 years ago but they achieved that small tree stature within 10 or 15 years. We could have clipped them hard and kept them down to shrub level had we chosen to, but their natural instinct is to grow a little larger than most people expect – but not too large.

Leafy and flowering this week and clearly more small tree than large shrub – Magnolia laevifolia. One year after a major prune.

I also wanted to show the effect of hard pruning on the second plant which is a central specimen in the front lawn. We don’t generally go for specimen plants in our lawns but this is a legacy installation that dates back to Mark’s parents creating a minor garden feature around a small millwheel and stone trough from the early colonial days of New Plymouth. See it leafy and flowering.

One year ago. Apologies for the low-grade photo which is not mine. I am sure I have a better one somewhere but I can’t find it. This plant is NOT deciduous. It has just been pruned very hard indeed.

Last spring in mid October, it received a severe prune. M. laevifolia has a tendency to defoliate – drop all its leaves – in a wet spring and we get plenty of those. Last year, its flowering was patchy and it had dropped pretty much all its leaves. It was looking twiggy, overgrown and pretty much dead, to the inexperienced eye at least. We thought it would be better to cut it back hard and emphasise its natural form. What a difference a year can make.

This type of drastic pruning and shaping also works on camellias and indeed loropetalums but not on every plant. It is do or die on rhododendrons (some will respond with vigour and some will die) but it will kill most conifers because they don’t sprout from bare wood. You really need to know the capacity of the plant to regenerate and to push growth buds out from the trunk and stems before you start.

While the flowering of the deciduous magnolias this year is patchy yet again (we are blaming La Nina with frequent heavy downpours and too many spoiled blooms hanging on the branches), the michelias bloom on unscathed.