Hey good morning it's Jason from Fraser Valley Rose Farm now every time i take
a low pruning cut or a deep pruning cut on trees or shrubs
i have this pang of guilt i wonder have i done the right thing is the plant
going to be able to recover from that especially if i do it in the winter
when there's no visible growth or no leaves left behind
and i'm just cutting down the stems so what i'm going to do in this video here
is i'm going to go back to some of the heaviest pruning cuts i've done
both this year and last i'll do a follow-up and show you
how the plant recovers from that because and spoilers
is quite encouraging they usually have way more dormant buds
than you ever would have imagined and they start shooting back from all sorts
of places so this is to encourage you to be brave
about for your pruning cuts if it's necessary to go low
your plants usually have a lot more in reserve than you than you at first think
they do so here's a rose that i've taken down
quite heavily this year rosa rubrifolia is the name and actually
i'm going down to the base of it here just for a second to show you
the foliage color that gives us his name this is one of the seedlings that has
dropped off of the plant and it's showing that beautiful purplish
glaucus color that the plant is famous for it's not really so
much a rose for its flowers as it is for its foliage
it's a wonderful shrub and yeah actually since i
have you down here anyway yes that's the that's the name right there rosa
rubrifolia at the time that i took the cut here and
the reason i took it is because i wanted to slip it
into this tire and i know that seems a little bit oddball for
for planting but i maintain a lot of stock roses out here
so i'm trying to find a way to keep the grass out from the base of these roses
so i can maintain my stalk so this one here i wanted to hold it and
unfortunately the plant was just far too large
to slip that tire over it was actually eight to ten feet
of shrub and so to get that tire over i really had to hack this thing down and
let's have a look at over here this will give you some idea i mean it
was just a straight flat cut on a completely bare stem all
of those red shoots that you see here now were
completely absent it was just a bare piece of bark when i took that
cutting and since then all of those shoots came and again i'll show you the
top here because that's kind of how far it's getting here
now is these beautiful new shoots
that are refreshing the shrub now is that a surprise to me
not really every rose as it has a leaf node every place along this stem
used to have a leaf and these are old old stems so
that was a long time ago but every place that had a leaf
it now has a spot where there are two i guess they call them guard buds that
hold their dormant until such time as the plant needs them well of course
when i cut this down all the energy that was stored in the
roots and up and down these stems had to find a place to go so the plant
wouldn't die and so it activated a whole bunch of
those different guard buds and so probably i won't let
all of these go i'll probably rub off some of these buds
if i think they're going the wrong direction or if they think they're too
crowded over time but just to show you that
there is just a whole ton of different places this plant
can come from
okay here's a follow-up to a video i made on a badly leaning apple tree i
have in my yard that i cut off a large piece of the
trunk the leaning trunk and i left just a
smaller side trunk or a side chute on and now i'm seeing how that recovers
from the pruning and i'd have to say this is coming along
really nicely now i'm going to put in some footage from
that video to show you where i actually left it at that point and i got some
feedback directly afterwards where people said you know you could
take it even lower than that and i left initially i'd left
some more of the side branches on the top and i'm
even regretting now that i left this last
side branch on the top to me it looks like it's just going to be a cleaner
habit now if i just let those six or eight
shoots right there start going out sideways and i select
from those and sort of trellis it from there so
right now i'm gonna go ahead and take off that one
and to me that looks much much better and i can see how strongly
it's recovering from that now one thing i was
worried about is how much i would get water spouting
or new shoots from the base of it so let's have a look at the base where i
took that big cut and see how it's coming back from from
it down there here's how it looks at the base here and
i'm going to zoom in a little bit so you can see
that it's actually recovering quite nicely from the cut there
i don't see any kind of further rot or any problems down there
so i'm quite happy with the condition of that after the winter
what i was worried about on fruit trees they sometimes talk about things called
water spouts or just excessive shooting that will
just go straight up and i'm a little concerned because the plant has
to put its energy somewhere that it's going to grow a whole bunch of
new shoots around the base of this plant so for now i'm going to watch it but i'm
going to just pinch those off and prevent those from taking up too
much of the energy of the plant and hopefully
direct the energy at those top shoots before i show you just one more example
i thought i might caution you that not every shrub rebounds equally well from a
heavy pruning i'm told by the rhododendron people that
a good healthy rhodo will take a prune even down below a foot
and still bounce back quite nicely as well many other deciduous shrubs
things like beauty bush hydrangea witch hazel and mock orange
all bounce back quite nicely evergreens like spruce pine juniper and fur
may not rebound at all if you cut past the point where they have
needles or leaves and go into that bare wood
so do take time to research the plant that you're considering a heavy prune on
and see how well other people have done with heavy prunes in similar situations
for my third and final example i'm going to show you this knockout rose that i
pruned last year and now i did a video at the time
on how to prune overgrown roses and if you go back to that video you'll see
that i took this thing here that used to be well from this angle
you would never be able to see that fence it was up past
eight feet tall and i cut it down and brought it right down to the stubs right
down in here to this very very old wood
almost to the point where if you looked at it you'd say boy that's not going to
come back but here it is just about exactly a year later in bloom
and at a much much more appropriate height and that's the point of this
pruning was not that i could solve every problem
of this rose because you know it'll still get black spot
it'll still get insect damage it'll still have all of the same
problems but now i won't be fighting with all of that old congested wood and
all of that height that inappropriate height of the
rose so this here is a much more manageable
shrub and from here i can just manage it with that light
spring pruning or a small structural pruning
in spring and some deadheading throughout the season just to bring it
back down but i'm quite happy with the way it turned
out so those are just three examples of plants that have benefited from my
heavy hand at pruning you'll note that i did some of those during the
dormant season some of those during the active season but for you before you
take any pruning decisions i would suggest that you do a
little bit of research on the specific plant
and understand your own climate in regards to doing this pruning
for instance a butterfly bush is going to respond much much
better to a spring pruning than it ever would from a fall or winter pruning
on roses and because i know rose as well and i know my climate i was quite
confident in making the cuts both in the dormant season
and in the active season but when it comes to your plants and your garden
i really would ask you to do some research on that first before you take
those heavy cuts that said the point of this video is to
encourage you that if it does become necessary to take those
heavy pruning cuts necessary for your garden situation or
for the plant or for whatever reason then go ahead and
take them and take them bravely because it's generally the case
that if it's a healthy vigorous plant it will recover quite well it has a lot of
dormant shoots way down low and is going to come back
from it quite nicely all right thanks so much for watching
today if you have any questions or if you have any experience in this regard
any warnings about species or plants that you shouldn't approach this way
drop those below the video i'd be happy to hear that as well