How Pruning Can Make Your Garden Amazingly Beautiful

Pruning matters

Going home from a stressful day at work is definitely what every busy person looks forward to everyday. Most often, what they first do upon arriving home is to change their clothes to a more comfortable one and stay in their bedroom to rest. Others storm their kitchen, cook their favourite food and eat before taking that much-needed rest.

Though some may find it odd, other people would tend to stay on their garden, watch their plants and talk to them like they are alive. Some say that talking to your plants everyday pushes them to produce beautiful flowers. Other enthusiasts even consider their plants as their children which also need TLC (tender loving care).

Yes, it’s definitely relaxing to see a beautifully-landscaped garden full of lovely flowers in different varieties. It’s pleasing to the eyes and can take away a day’s stress. But maintaining a beautiful garden is not easy. It requires plenty of time and commitment.

If your budget permits, you can hire a gardener to take care of your plants. But if you don’t, you can very well take care of them yourself though you need some help if you are not an expert.

Since plants are living things, they can grow tall, big and wide. If you have a small garden, then you have a problem with space once your plants grow and reproduce. But this problem can be solved through pruning.

Pruning, or trimming, prevents your plants from growing up irregularly. It allows you to shape your plants the way you want them to look.

Pruning also gets rid of unnecessary branches, buds or roots of the plants and promotes the general look of your garden.

Pruning is also done to get nursery specimens for transplant, and to increase the quality of the flowers and fruits. But not all plants can be trimmed using the same techniques since specialized pruning can be done on such plants as roses, grapevines and fruit trees.

So how is pruning done? First, you have to choose the correct pruning tool for your plants. If you will be pruning your roses, then you need to have a hand pruner; or small and large bypass lopper for plants with medium branches. For trees, you might need a chainsaw.

Second, you need to know the right time to prune your plants. One good sign is when your orchids already have extra buds or when your roses show more stems.

Susan Gruber, Briggs & Stratton Yard Smarts horticulturalist, suggested that when pruning summer-flowering trees, shrubs, vines, hydrangea and roses, you have to remove the dead, damaged or crowded stems. If you desire, you can shape or reduce the size of your plant.

Steve Hutton, president of the Conard-Pyle Company, says it’s time to prune garden roses “when forsythia starts to bloom.”

When pruning, Mr. Hutton says “the roses should be cut leaving no more than 12 inches of the old canes.”

He also suggested to “prune out any light, twiggy growth from the base of the plant” to create a stronger plant with lots of blooms.