The best thing about writing for you is that every month, I need to find something that you might find relevant to your gardening life and it inspires me to keep improving my gardens, too.
February is the time to start pruning shrubs and trees. The sap has yet to rise, which is a good thing for winter pruning. A garden club friend of mine says that when the sap is rising, you can hear it moving up the tree. If you drive by my house in the spring and see me with my ear pressed on the trunk of my trees, I’m listening, too.
Without leaves on the branches, it’s easy to see the shape of the shrub or tree and any broken branches. If branches are crossed and rubbing on each other, make a choice and remove one of the branches. If this looks like a task above your comfort level, call an arborist.
Yellow and red twig dogwoods can benefit from your clippers. Remove one-third of the older stems, the ones that no longer have a nice, bright color. Trim to a more symmetrical shape now, too. Every few years I cut my red twig dogwood down to about three inches.
This is called “rejuvenation” and this fancy term calms Kent down when he sees the huge pile of branches. If you have a privacy hedge, cut back one half of the shrub one year and the other half the next. Mine is a really hardy specimen. It self-seeded in my front shrub bed, but I had to move it because it just looked goofy there. As luck/ bad luck would have it, I had a space where a crab apple had died and the red twig dogwood has been thriving in its place for many years.
Don’t prune or shape spring-flowering shrubs because you would be removing the flower buds. But you can bring in branches to bloom indoors. Cut a few branches and smash the end of the stems with a hammer. Soak them overnight in the tub, covered completely with tepid water. In the morning, put them in vases and wait for the blooms to delight you.
Spring is coming!
