Masterpiece Landscaping Blog

Remember, mid February to late March  is the best time of the year to prune your apple and crabapple, pear, plum and mountain ash trees.  All of thes fruit bearing woody plants are members of the rose family and are susceptible to a deadly bacterial disease, fireblight.  If pruned during the growing season, in spring especially, there is great risk for infection particularly if fireblight happens to be active in the neighborhood or if following your pruning, the weather turns wet and windy.

Creating a beautiful form  should be, ideally,  a major consideration  when pruning any of these trees, especially  plums, Waneta, Superior, or the native wild American plum.

Pruning apples and  crabapples can be a more difficult task…Some cultivars are not very small,    and most overproduce ugly, stiff,  twiggy, and thorny  branchlets which often cross one another.  In order to reestablish beauty of form to some older crabapple and apple trees, pruning is often required annually for three or four years and alternately for  years after that.   Pruning after a long period of time of  no pruning will usually cause numerous vertical shoots often of great length the next year…two to four feet in one growing season which make the trees appear quite ugly usually.

These vertical spears are called, “watersprouts”.

Some pruning of crabapples in early March  every year reduces the numbers of watersprouts.

Careful and clever pruning can create beautful trees.

If you planted a tree of any kind  last year in a space too small for its eventual size, you can 1) transplant it, or, 2) if you are clever with your pruning skills, and  will religiously prune   the big tree to keep it  small in its space, you can control its shape and size.  Warning, don’t neglect the pruning…once year will be enough.

Last year I finally had to remove a beautiful 20 plus year old white oak, only 7 feet tall, a seedling planted by the squirrels.  I had pruned it annually to maintain the shape and size which I had artistically designed.  I am fond of white oaks.  But I cannot allow for them to block out the little sunlight I have allowed my flowering perennials.   I often maintain these oaks as shrubs or small trees.  they add good  color to the fall garden, sometimes even into the winter, for most retain their rust colored leaves well into winter.  Pruning a single stem three year old oak almost to the ground will create a multiple stemmed tree.  Such prunings ideally should be done early April.

Check your calendar.  If you are too busy or timid to prune your rose family trees, call Masterpiece Landscaping, Ltd. at 952-933-5777.   We will make your tree an art piece again.

The landscape gardener is constantly evaluating the state of the gardened grounds.

During these weeks of  tired summer there generally is more color throughout the grounds than at other seasnons.   Herbaceous plants are bigger, paths become narrower, and there is no space left for the chrysanthemums you were planning on buying to shore up the autumn look.

This is a good time for grooming the garden.  Tools are needed.  Quality tools, not those cheaply made types.  Hand pruners, lopper, hedge shears, small garden saw, large garden saw, garden spade  make up the classic collection.  Flat spade might also be used if edging had not been done earlier in the season.  Leaf rakes and snow shovels are seasonal implements which might involve some grooming.

I rarely wander through my garden without my hand pruners.  My eyes automatically draw me to the disorderly and if it is prunable, almost without a thought my mental machine has removed the offending form.  I call this grooming.   The hand pruners is the most important tool for grooming garden plants.

Removing all or some of  the flower stalks from my huge hostas, (some stalks quite ugly even when in bloom) can be done at the same time one strolls through the garden admiring its beauty.

If one can stroll through ones grounds at any season and not notice beauty, dear fellow Americans….there is something very wrong with arrangements made on your grounds!Home is not quite home as it should be.  (Time to call us at Masterpiece Landscaping, Ltd..952-933-5777 !)

If your home is like mine, every year expanding government is expanding taxes on my landscape garden where my house is located.  Government does not often tax garden beauty, yet, so I want the best visual and spiritual return for my tax dollar as I walk up and down the paths of my paradise.

Major reforming of more mature woody plants should almost always be done in early spring.  This activity is not to be considered grooming.  It often involves  major surgery.  Garden saws, pole saws, loppers, spade shovels, are among the tools more commonly used for this kind of heavy duty grooming.  An axe might be needed in a final analysis, especially if all else goes wrong.  We can review the surgery in another blog entry.

As one passes the Winged Euonymus or the Pagoda Dogwood in the August garden, one might notice sprigs arising from an otherwise clean and attractive bark.  Or certain branchings don’t look right.  Here, the garden loppers come into use.  Eventually your trained eye will have your  pruners removing these objects of discontent without the thought ever bothering the mind.  This is a good stage of landscape garden education for these little grooming acts can be done almost subconsciously.  They will not interfere with the sweet elixir of  pleasure caused  by the beauty of your landscape as you stroll, almost in a trance, admiring all of the pictures you and Nature have created……

……..that is, if your plants have been cleverly chosen, have been placed in their proper locations, and you know why you have done what you have done.  Once your artistry has reached the combination of all three of these skills, you have passed the elementary school of fortunate luck.

One of the unfortunate causes for  atrocious home grounds landscape gardening  in general,  is that even in the most disorderly designs there might be  a degree of attraction  if  just one “something” in the grounds is in bloom.   Ugliness in the landscape is often very public.  One has to enter a theater to see a bad movie, play, or opera, and usually has to even buy a ticket to get in.  One can easily avoid reading corrupt newspapers or a mess of a book or staring at blank or otherwise stupid canvases called modern art.

It is very difficult however to avoid mishandled landscape gardens created or not created in the name of art.  A broken urn behind three petunias and a marigold, bed springs placed delicately as if growing beside a small spring, a Baby’s Breath covered with Creeping Charlie behind a bicycle tire with  a sign leaning on it announcing  “LOVE”  …… all of this rich meaning in the front yard and unscreened.  Yet, it  will be seen by every innocent  who had the misfortune to  take a wrong turn and had to see it whether he or she wanted to or not.

In another neighborhood, such as the Whitney Museum , given a twist of a title such as “American Injustice”, a New Yorker  might be thrilled to pay $107 plus sales and entertainment tax for a ticket and feel modern and correct doing so.  Yet, another may not and could easily avoid doing so by remaining outdoors.

In closing this blog article I must add a couple other instruments useful when grooming the landscape garden….FINGERS, especially the thumb and its index neighbor.  Supple knees and a good back able to endure stretching are good accompaniments.

One bends at the knees reaches for a “weed”, defined as a plant out of place, hopefully a pullable one, and pulls it.

Most landscape gardeners do enjoy this ritual. I do.  One feels so clean after a period of such an intimate exercise,  especially when the disorder comes out of its habitat root and all.  Oh, the pleasure of it all.

To prune or not to prune during late summer? Not in September, landscape gardeners. …not unless you have no choice or the pruning will be very light.  We are refering to woody plants, of course.

As a generalization, the best time to prune  your woody plants is in early spring……with the exceptions:  1) certain deciduous plants whose blooms you value and want to show off during the coming season,  and 2) certain evergreen conifers such as pine, fir,  and spruce.   Plants in both of these categories should not be pruned in late summer or fall.

Pruning out broken limbs, die back, or very light corrective pruning  usually can be done at any time of the year.

Some deciduous shrubs can be pruned to the very ground in late fall and produce beautifully the next spring.  The smokebushes, (Cotinus) hardy usually in the Twin City area is an example.  Black Lace Elderberry is another.

Most arborvitae, juniper, hemlock and yew can be trimmed or gently reshaped in late summer or autumn.  Radical pruning is not recommended.

Those flowering deciduous shrubs whose blossoms you cherish, should be pruned immediately after their peak blooming season.  French lilacs, then,  would be pruned sometime around June 15th, a bit later for the late blooming varieties such as Donald Wyman or Minuet.  VanHouttei Spiraea, often called northern bridal wreath spiraea,  blooms around Memorial Day in the Twin City area, and should be pruned at the same time as the French lilacs.  Most of the rest of the spiraeas develop their flower buds during the same time  as their new spring foliage, called “new wood”.  French lilacs developed their flowering buds the previous late summer and fall  along with last years foliage, which wood would be called “old wood”.