good morning this is angela with parkrose permaculture i am up in my front yard right
next to the street this morning so there may be intermittent car or city bus noise in this video
i recently put a poll up on my patreon where i asked my patrons what they felt i should make my
next video about and overwhelmingly the response was how to prune lilacs so that's what we're going
to do today we're going to be pruning lilacs and i'm going to walk you through my four-step process
to pruning lilacs for optimal health and optimal bloom next year so when i say lilac what i mean
is syringe of vulgaris i'm not talking about the shrub that is commonly grown in this part
of the country that is called california lilac that is cyanothis and please don't prune it this
way it requires a different pruning method to get good blooms and good shaping so syringe vulgaris
is a multi-stemmed shrub that is native to the balkan region and it flowers best on the
previous season's growth so that means you need to prune it right after it is finished blooming
and that will help the plant send up more shoots and suckers from the base
and also help regenerate the tips of the shrubs and that way you will get a whole
season's worth of vegetative growth this year so you get more blooms next spring so like i said i
have a four-step process for how i evaluate and prune my lilacs first let's talk about the tools
that you need to do this when pruning your lilacs you will need a set of secateurs or hand pruners
gloves and a pruning saw and if you're like me and it's early in the morning a strong cup of coffee
so you know it's time to begin pruning your lilacs when the blossoms start to look sad
if you look back at my earth day video you can see this lilac was a
lovely purple it's from the hold the clayer lilac garden i got it about nine years ago
and it was a lovely shade of purple and now it has faded to white with brown time to remove these
deadheading is done by taking your pruners and
making a single cut between the blossoms and the first set of leaves
so i have deadheaded both of these lilacs with the exception of a few blooms that are still
doing very well that when i am done filming i will be cutting and putting in a vase in
the house those last few that look real good so this may not look like a lot of blooms for two
mature lilacs but keep in mind i picked many of them for arrangements throughout the season
so these are just the ones i allowed to persist on the shrubs
the next part of pruning involves reducing the overall height of the shrub and thinning it out
through a method called tipping off or tipping back
lilacs frequently produce a triad of stems where the central leader will bloom and then
send off two side shoots sometimes there is just one liter that blooms at the end
when you get the triad shape you want to remove the spent blossom in the middle all the way back
to where the three branches connect in order to shorten the overall height you can reduce
triads even farther down looking at this triad you can see there is additional growth beyond
and above this section of three i am still going to come in and clip out the middle section leaving
the two sides to form a y this will help produce blossoms on both of the side branches next year
so with a lilac being a multi-stem shrub much like our elderberries or any of the other shrubs
we grow for maximum bloom and fruit production here we want to focus on removing the oldest
and thickest wood because it is going to be less productive some folks say you should remove any
major branches that are bigger around than your thumb if you want to keep your lilac
heavily flowering and diminutive but for me i find that doing that sometimes i end up
with a lilac with very big lush blossoms and those blossoms then tend to flop if all of my
shoots are kept really small so i do let some get thicker but i want to remove the thickest oldest
wood and that will encourage the production of new suckers from the basement so if you have a
lot of big old stems consider only removing one third of them this year to maintain the shape of
the shop so let me go in i am going to take out this big boy right here and then i'll be back
all right so that's three of my four pruning steps completed i have deadheaded which helps
me get a good look at the shape of the shrub and move on from there some folks might say why not
just remove the largest stems first because then you will automatically deadhead some material
i find it much more useful to deadhead so i can get a better picture of where the shrub is going
and not be distracted by blossoms i have tipped back at the middle of every triad
and i have removed one third of the oldest wood at the base of the shrub now i'm going to do the
fourth step in my typical pruning cycle which is to remove any thin straggly shoots suckers coming
up from the base of the shrub that are either crossing or too far from the center of the shrub
or they're just not looking super healthy so i want to take all of those out now when you take
these out you have the option to snip them at the base of the shrub or take a shovel and jab it in
there and remove them and those suckers will root and you can give them to your friends so that's a
great easy way to propagate a lilac when you are removing those suckers that have walked too far
from the center of the shrub think about sharing them with folks they root very readily don't need
any rooting hormone if you use a shovel you can sometimes get a little bit of root off with them
um half of my lilacs i have gotten from cuttings or suckers and i've had great rooting success
so just stick it in the ground about halfway and it should take a closer look at what i'm talking
about here this is coming up not too far from the center of my shrub from the the core of the shrub
so i'm going to keep it it's a good thickness about the thickness of my index finger and it will
get larger and will be productive in the future but this little puppy right next to it is kind
of thin and flimsy and it is growing the wrong direction and crossing with this other healthy
branch so i am going to remove that all the way at the ground with my hand pruners okay now
you can take this and cut it back leave a couple of leaf nodes on it here one two
cut it back just above one if i take this and i stick it in the ground about halfway
most of the time it will root in fact when you are pruning your lilacs
be careful where you throw down the prunings because they root easily
here's another example of thin or flimsy material that i want to remove and while it isn't coming
all the way from the base you can see it is growing here i'm gonna go ahead and remove that
those branches won't get big they won't be productive they won't help you out now farther up
these little guys these will flower next year so i want to leave those so here is my finished lilac
i have not finished the one behind it yet but i'm going to keep it about that height
so that i get that stagger of blooms but here you can see i've removed one third of the dead
wood i like the shape of it it's not too tall it should send up new suckers to fill in some
of the gaps where i have removed the oldest wood and it will bloom all along the tips of this new
growth that continues to grow this spring so i should get a lush show of blooms next year
and i've been careful to keep some of the lower branches mid height and highest so that i get a
continuous swath of blossoms up the plant that helps ensure that we don't have the problem that
a lot of lilacs get where they're very dead in the middle and the blooms are all way up high
out of reach so i hope that helps give you a look at what i do to prune my lilacs and keep them
the shape and size that i want and keep them highly productive
now a friend messaged me recently and said she had an old lilac that had just two main stems
and all of the center is like dead and covered in lichen and doesn't bloom and all of the blooms are
way up high at the top what do you do if you have that situation so this calls for a little
bit of courage on the part of the gardener what you need to do is a total rehab of your lilac
if you have a lilac that's in that situation you've either neglected to prune it for many
years or you've inherited it or moved on to a property that had a lilac that had been neglected
take it and cut it all the way to the ground remove everything
it seems really radical but if all you have left are very thick old stems coming up from the plant
and you don't have any small suckers you need to rehab it so in general you remove a third of the
oldest wood but for a total rehab cut everything to the ground you want to do this in spring so
that the plant has all of late spring and summer and fall to send up new shoots and regenerate it
you may find a decrease in blooms the next year because you really cut it back but you may also
find it's reinvigorated and you get more blooms than you've ever had before it just depends on
the lilac if you do a total rehab on your lilac and you cut it all the way back please be sure and
feed it i will be feeding my lilacs with comfrey tea and also a good layer of leaf mold or compost
because i want to encourage that new growth that new development of suckers from the base
so that i get good blooms next year so if you need to encourage an entire rehab tons of new
growth please make sure you fertilize and care for your lilac after you cut it back
to the ground so i hope that helps you with some pruning tips i hope that you are able to
effectively prune your lilacs to get the best display for next spring
if you got something out of this video please give it a thumbs up please share it with your friends
please consider subscribing i also have a patreon as i mentioned at the beginning of the video i'm
going to be continuing to make exclusive content for my patrons folks who choose the highest level
of patronage get a special gift in the mail and i want to make sure that i am pulling my patrons to
produce the kind of content that y'all want so i'll be putting up more polls this video was made
because my patrons requested this topic so i'll be back soon hopefully talking about tomato planting
because that's what's next on my schedule hope you all have a happy mother's day and i'll be back