Trapped in the Garden: Adventures in Spring Pruning
As for the clematis - it had scrambled up the arbor and through the roses, and then ended in a high, romantic looking tangle of vines piled atop the arbor and down the next side. Since this was the type of clematis demands severe pruning - to a pair of healthy leaf buds near the bottom of the growth - we ended up with a small mountain of tangled and mostly dead vines. These tangled with the discarded rose canes until we ended up with something that resembled a giant, snarling porcupine.
But when the dead stuff is gone, it's easier to see what else needs doing. So you next look for anything on the plant that doesn't look healthy. One hopes that the results of this trimming is minimal - but we had some rhododendrons with entire sections that looked sickly, so ended up with a large, sad heap of rusty rhodo leaves and branches.
And then we got to the fun part - the Demented. This is where artistic judgment comes into play. You can best define a demented branch as any that grows in a way that it should not.
In many shrubs, I begin by removing any branches or canes that are thinner than a pencil. This is especially true for roses. In fact, with many shrubs the thin stuff is also the dead stuff - not strong enough yet to ride out the ravages of winter.
Some shrubs, like my caryopteris, are thinner than pencils for most of the growth. If the plant's branches are supposed to be thin, you can ignore this part of the rule. But if the idea is generally to have strong, healthy and thick branches, removing the tiny ones simply allows the larger, healthy ones to receive all the plant's energy without wasting it on tiny, twiggy growth.
You would be amazed at how much of this the average tree or shrub can sport.
Demented branches grow toward the center of the shrub, away from the light and air. This, as you must agree, is crazy behavior. Remove those and you also improve air circulation. We removed enough of these to create a nice heap of trimmings.
Some branches seem romantically inclined, twisting and twining with each other in a passionate embrace. Naturally, this makes it difficult for either to sprout leaves and flowers, since there is so little room between them. So, for their own
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