- Hi, thanks for joining us for The Family Plot: Gardening in the Mid-South.

I'm Chris Cooper.

Pruning is an important spring garden task.

Today we're spending the whole show talking about how to prune your ornamentals.

That's just ahead on The Family Plot: Gardening in the Mid-South.

- (female announcer) Production funding for The Family Plot: Gardening in the Mid-South is provided by the WKNO Production Fund, the WKNO Endowment Fund, and by viewers like you, thank you.

[upbeat country music] - Welcome to The Family Plot.

I'm Chris Cooper.

Pruning helps keep your shrubs and trees healthy and attractive.

Today, we're gonna take the whole show and talk about how to prune ornamentals.

First, we're going to see how to prune shrubs, then rose bushes, and finally, crape myrtles.

Joellen Dimond starts out with showing us the correct way to prune a shrub.

[upbeat country music] Hi Joellen.

- Hi.

- Why do we prune?

- Well, you know, pruning, there's several reasons why you should prune.

The number one is probably safety.

You know, shrubs get too big around your house and you wanna get them lower.

So you can either see in or out your windows and just keeping them in on the sidewalks or the driveway, trying to keep them out of the way of your vehicle or pedestrians.

- Lawnmower.

Yeah, if you're cutting grass, right?

- So, you know, there's a lot of reasons to prune.

Safety is the number one.

- Safety.

- But there also for the health of the plant, you know, if a tight plant doesn't have any air circulation in it, you can prune to make it more airy so that has better light and air circulation to keep diseases and pests away.

- Okay.

- Another one is for flower and fruit production.

Think about an apple tree.

You know, it's got tons of little apples on it.

Well, you don't want a whole bunch of little apples.

You'd rather have just a fewer bigger apples.

So you'd have to take some of those off.

And of course, roses, you know, rosarians, they really prune hard and they keep the just one bud on each stem to get those huge flower buds.

So now there are some several tools that you can use to do that.

This is probably the number one used and bought item for pruning.

This will prune up to three-fourths of an inch - Okay.

- In diameter.

when you want something larger, you are going to have to go to what they call a lopper.

And this will get up to one and a half-inch diameter branches.

Anything larger than that, then you really need, it's anything larger than that and you really need a pruning saw.

Now I like these because they close up and the blade is away from you and you simply open it, - There it goes.

- And it locks.

- It's nice.

- And pruning saws have wide-set sharp teeth and they cut, unlike other saws, on the pull.

So when you get next to a branch and you pull, that's how you cut it.

It cuts on the pull.

And this is up to maybe one, two and a half, three inches.

Anything larger than that, and I really suggest you get someone who knows what they're doing, like a certified arborist, to prune your trees.

These are the only hand pruners that I have.

And I, these are, see, I look very nice because I rarely use them.

- Okay, nice.

I hold it.

- If nothing else, make sure your tools are sharp.

So always get a file and make sure your tools are sharp, they're clean, they're oiled so that they work well.

There is another pruning item that a lot of people like to use, and this is a pruning shear.

Shearing plants is not a healthy way to keep your plants looking good because they force a lot of growth so that the interior of the plant does not have leaves.

Like this one isn't sheared.

And you can see there's leaves clear down in the plant, and that's what you want, to get air and light movement into your plant.

Shearing stops that and a lot of sheared plants end up with a lot of pests and diseases because of that.

So it's not as a healthy way to prune.

But people still use this.

- Yeah, they do.

- I don't, there's all kinds of hand shears, but I rarely use these if ever.

[Chris chuckling] So that's that.

- Okay.

- Some of the things that you're going to have to know about a plant is gonna help you prune it better.

The first thing is all, excuse me, all branches have what they call a terminal bud or an apical bud.

Same thing.

And if you, this particular bud inhibits the growth of lateral buds.

When you cut the apical bud, the lateral buds tend to break and grow.

Because the hormone that's inhibiting them is gone.

So in that way, you can learn how to give, fill in a plant or give direction to a plant.

If you have a lopsided plant, you can cut the terminal buds on them.

Lateral buds will come and fill out that side of the plant.

So you can use that to your advantage.

If you look at each of these leaves, there is a bud that comes out between the leaf petiole and the stem.

That's where all the buds reside.

And those are points of growth.

And that's where you prune to.

But you'll notice these leaves face different directions.

Well then if you, if I cut this plant right here, this leaf is growing in this direction.

That means when the bud comes and breaks, it will send out a stem in this direction.

So you can control the direction that your plant grows by which bud you leave out and you cut up against.

And that is also helps you take our plants and shrubs and make them go out - Instead of.

- And instead of in.

- Gotcha.

- And then that keeps light and air movement through the plant to help with diseases and pests.

- Okay.

- So, those are some of the principles that we use.

And when you do cut it, we will cut a quarter of an inch in the direction that the bud is going.

'cause you don't wanna put a whole lot of material above where the bud is.

Don't cut in the middle because the plant will have to harden that off.

And you don't want the plant to waste energy when something you could have cut off real quickly.

You want it to put energy into the bud that's gonna build that stem out.

- Makes sense.

- Now, we're gonna talk about different types of plants.

Look at these.

These are blooming.

The best time to prune any shrub, it doesn't matter what kind, any shrub that blooms is within a few weeks after it finishes blooming.

- Okay.

- That way the whole, the plant has an entire year to build buds for next year's bloom.

Next thing you wanna look at is see how the bottom of this plant is further out than the top of it.

And so, unlike my father, he used to do this all the time.

He had boxwoods and he made little round circles out of them.

- The meatballs, yeah.

- Drove me crazy.

But he continued to do it.

The problem is if I did that with this plant and cut this, this part will be shaded by the top part of this plant and it won't bloom.

And that's why they tend to get leggy.

And you'll see lollipop plants is because they took away the lower limbs so that they're not getting light.

So azaleas and things that bloom, especially you want a nice angle on the plant and you can make it rounded, but make it mounded and not rounded.

- Mounded.

- Yeah.

Mounded, with the base further away than the top.

- Okay.

- At an angle.

- Gotcha.

- And this one here is getting a little tall.

So again, I'm gonna find a point of growth and prune it off.

And the main point of pruning like this is to make it look like you haven't pruned.

When we get done, you'll never know I was there.

You won't notice that somebody has pruned.

- In essence, you're hiding the cut.

I think I've heard that a couple of times.

- Well, when you prune correctly at a point of growth where a leaf is, then it's the leaf that's there is naturally kind of hiding where you've cut.

- Okay, that makes sense.

- So we can, now that's flowering plants.

There are vase-shaped plants.

Vase-shaped plants have a whole bunch of stems that come right at the base of the plant and come up.

Now they do have some other branches that are taller that you can prune.

But majority of those, you cut one-third of those shoots that are coming up out of the ground.

So you'll go in at the base of the ground and cut one third of those out.

- Wow.

Okay.

- And you usually use the older ones.

Keep the newer ones.

And you can tell by the color of the bark, whether they're new or old and the size of the bark.

- Gotcha.

- Well, there's a Florida anise that's a little bit out of control.

But this is a little bit tall here.

By taking the apical dominance of this particular branch out, we'll force others below it to branch out, which will make this plant more full.

[pruners snipping] [pruners snipping] And you don't have to prune much to stimulate that type of growth.

And usually what I will do is I will stop and I'll, when I get done and I think I'm done, I look back of it and say, you know, I don't like that.

I think I want to go further.

So I go to down to another point of growth.

You learn to prune by pruning.

You see, I don't like that.

So I go to another point of growth.

I don't like that.

So I go down to another point of growth until I get the plant looking more round like I want it to.

And also this is gonna force the lateral buds to come out and make it more full.

- Good stuff Joellen.

Appreciate that.

[upbeat country music] Today, we're talking about spring pruning.

Usually pruning only removes a small portion of the plant.

But roses, you will probably remove most of the plant.

Let's see how rose expert Bill Dickerson does it.

[upbeat country music] - First thing I usually do is look for dead wood.

This is dead here at the bottom.

And so, I just close to the cane, the main cane, I just cut that off.

And as you can see, it's brown and it's not live healthy tissue.

- Right.

- Okay, now I'm looking, now this, it's big and healthy at the top.

But right here you can see starting to get brown.

- I see it.

- And it's dead.

So I just to facilitate, I'll just cut it as close as I can and I'll cut it off.

- All right.

- Here's a small one, which is kind of a small cane.

I'll get rid of that.

And I'm opening the bush up as I go.

Anything smaller than a pencil, you try to get rid of.

- Try to get rid of it, all right.

- I'm just going to take this out to open up the center of the bush.

- So why do we need to open it up though?

That's to get the air moving through and... - Air moving through.

Black spot is your biggest enemy.

And you have to spray, which is a fungicide.

- Sure.

- And if you got air going through, it doesn't just set and set in there and anything, if it's too close, you're gonna get diseased.

- Okay, gotcha.

- If you get rid of the dead wood and the little small stuff, it just kind of, it gets easier and easier to figure out where you are.

- Right, you can see it pretty good, huh?

- You can see, - I see what you're doing.

- You try to get rid of, now keep in mind I'm gonna go down to about, depending on the bush, the bigger bush, if I left it here, it's gonna have more blooms with smaller blooms.

Now if you cut it down to 12 inches to 18 inches, you're gonna have fewer blooms.

But they'll be bigger blooms.

So if you're wanting to take 'em in the house, you may cut 'em down a little more hard.

If you want a lot of blooms, you just leave them out just for garden rows.

- Okay.

- Right here, example, I cut right above where the leaf axil is and we're a little late because everything's leafing out.

Ideally you want it where there's nothing there.

But when you see these leaf structures at the leaf axil, if I cut above this, that next cane's going to go into the bush.

- Right, I see.

- If I cut above this one, it's gonna go the same way this is.

So I kind of manipulate Mother Nature.

I try to cut where this new cane, where I cut it off here last year, I cut it so that it would grow out and not in.

- Right.

I gotcha.

Gotcha.

Makes sense.

This probably took years of practice, right?

To be able to get it down the way you- - Well, it takes in the first time I'm like, oh, I don't know how I'm gonna do this.

But if you mess up, it's just like a bad haircut.

It'll come back and you just and you learn from your mistakes.

It's a little harsh, but you have to kind of teach this.

I'm just gonna take this whole big, big guy out.

- Okay.

- And it just opens up the bush and the more you take off, you're gonna put that energy into the canes that you have left.

- Okay.

- Here's some dead wood.

I'm gonna take it out.

- Oh, it is.

It's hollow.

- And then, let's see, I'm gonna take this to there.

I'm gonna leave this bush.

Typically a little taller than most.

I found a bud eye right here.

I want it to come out.

So I'm gonna cut there.

I'm going to face this because there's a bud eye here and the next cane will come out.

- Now could you tell us bud eye, I mean, what do you mean when you say that?

- Well, on the cane where this comes out, you've got a shot for three.

Here's two right here.

There's, let me cut this off, [tool clicking] like right here, where a leaf is going to be.

You cut it right above that, it's either gonna come out as a cane or is it gonna come out as a leaf and you've got three shots to get a cane to come out of that.

- Okay.

- So a lot of times if that's gonna do this, I'll just break that off.

- Just clean it off.

- Because I don't want leaves 'cause it's a little late.

I don't want leaves.

I want a cane to come out.

- Okay, gotcha.

- And typically this time of year, I try to do it before they start leafing out.

You can see this is starting to leaf out.

- Yeah, it's lot.

- Now it's already leafed out.

And I'll break this off and then hope that I'll get a cane out of it instead of a leaf.

- Okay, I got you.

- All right, over here, there's a little sticking out on this side.

- Yeah, I see it.

- Later on, that'll have a leaf on it.

In the spring, everything starts from the top and works its way down.

So where I prune here, the canes will come up from the top.

You'll get some from the bottom.

But most of them where I prune that next cane like this is gonna come back that way.

- Okay.

- This is coming in the middle and I see it's bothering Chris.

I'm just going take it down - It's bothering me.

- Real low.

- All right.

- And you're like, oh no, I've got this big.

Well, once I cut it and let's just say I cut it here last year, you here last year, the new cane's going to come out and you want your bigger canes at the bottom instead of up here at the top.

- Okay.

- Because at the end of the year, like some of these, they'll be 10 foot tall.

- Wow.

- That's questionable.

Is there a hole in there Chris?

- There is a hole.

There sure is.

Well let's just, - Ah, alright.

- Here's the culprit.

You see we're a leaf borer, not a leaf borer, cane borer.

Don't touch that.

That will, and that's why you use the Elmer's glue.

After I prune, I'll come on top of these and put a, just a dab of Elmer's glue.

Not a lot, just a dab.

And that's just enough.

It's a little old critter.

And he'll drill and lay his eggs and he might go a half inch or he might come all the way down.

So if you go ahead and do that, you'll save a big cane like that.

- So it can be saved though, at the end of the day.

- It can.

And what I typically do is, I'll just cut.

See, he went down pretty deep.

So I'm gonna list to see how deep he went.

[Chris chuckling] - It's getting close.

- But you want to get the healthy white pith in the center.

When you do cut it back as bad as that looks.

And I'm gonna stop there.

It's starting to brown up some.

Then you'll have a healthy cane come out.

- Okay.

- Now this is a new cane which you want to do.

It's not a basal growth, which comes at the root graft.

I'm going, wish I had eyes in the back of my head.

I'll go back and double check that.

[Chris chuckling] I'm gonna cut that.

The next year, it'll shoot a cane, through the summer, it'll have a cane and a bloom, which it takes about 40 days depending on the size of the blooms.

Once you cut that in 40 days, you'll get a new cane come up, it develops a cane and then you'll get a bloom.

- Okay.

- And then in 30, 40 days, then prune it back.

And I see where this is going to go this way.

And I can see the little red dot.

I'm gonna cut just typically about a quarter of an inch.

Ideally if you do it at an angle and run the water away, that's fine.

I usually, sometimes I do that and sometimes I don't.

And ideally a bush is 8, 10, 12 years old.

You want to take a big healthy cane like this, cut it out, in hopes of getting a newer cane.

'cause some sooner or later it's gonna die.

- Okay.

- So you get rid of it, you get rid of all that energy that's spent to that and you're putting it in a new cane.

And then that way you keep your bush invigorated.

[upbeat country music] - To prune roses, removing most of the plant is good.

With crape myrtles, it's not.

Certified arborist Wes Hopper shows the correct way to prune a crape myrtle and avoid crape murder.

We are going to stop the chop.

- Stop the chop.

- We're gonna stop the chop.

That's what Jason Reeves always says.

- Stop the chop.

- Yes.

Can you show us the correct way to prune these crape myrtles?

- I'll do the best I can.

This looks like it's been a maintenance nightmare [Chris laughing] in the past.

So we're gonna look at it like artistic maintenance.

- Okay.

- And try to prune this tree to where next year it won't require so much maintenance.

- Okay.

- And do it the proper way.

So we'll start by being able to get to the tree.

I use my hand pruners and I'll remove these water sprouts that are gonna poke me in the face as we're working.

- Okay.

- And also since we're working looking up most of the time, we'll throw our debris away so we don't trip over it while we're working.

On this tree, it has multiple stems.

Notice I said tree.

- Tree.

I did notice.

- These have been trimmed like a hedge.

- Wow.

Okay.

- Crape murder, just chopped.

However you want to categorize it.

It's a tree.

Alright, now I mentioned multiple stems.

Put these in my back pocket.

- Tell us what you mean by multiple stems.

- These are your stems right here.

- Alright, - There's a one, two, three, four, five stems on here.

- Okay.

- It's getting kind of crowded.

You see how this is clustered up over here?

- Yeah.

- We're gonna eliminate this stem and try to eliminate some of the maintenance.

- Okay.

[saw rasping] - And we're gonna cut it in the middle so we don't have any tears, nice and slow.

Put my hand saw back up.

- Nice clean cut.

- Nice clean cut.

[leaves rustling] Look what I've done, I've opened it up.

- Wow.

- We may get this to look like a tree after all.

[Chris chuckling] [saw rasping] I usually like to stick with my pruners unless it's a large cut.

- Okay.

- I do have a set of loppers over there, but with this thin-bark tree, sometimes your hand saw can actually scuff the bark.

And we try to avoid that.

Now look at me.

I'm pruning on another stem that I feel like should not belong there.

- Ah, so that one's coming off too, right?

- So let's eliminate some more of the maintenance.

We're not gonna have the perfect shape [saw rasping] of the stems, but I'll come back later and cut those rest of the way off.

- Okay.

Man, you really opened that thing up.

- No, I've got it open.

We got a bird nest right here.

- Yeah, I saw that.

- I don't think there's anything in it.

But anytime you have wildlife in the tree, come back to it.

Let the wildlife survive and we're gonna eliminate all this epicormic growth.

- And what kind of growth is that?

- Epicormic growth is growth that grows secondary.

- Okay.

- It's usually loosely attached.

Breaks easily.

- Like water sprouts.

- Like water sprouts.

[pruners snipping] I don't wanna eliminate all these, I just wanna eliminate the junk.

I'm going back a little bit past the growth collar, but okay, we're trying to prevent that succulent epicormic growth or water sprouts from going crazy on it.

See, like this is a nub right here.

Can you see that?

- Yeah, I can see that.

- I like to get that a little bit cleaner.

'cause that's gonna put out growth.

It's gonna go poof.

Couple more of these.

Step back and take a look at it.

We got a broken one at the top.

We're gonna- - Yeah, I see a couple.

- We're gonna tend to, let's get rid of this one.

And Chris, you can see where they came in before and they just went - Right over the top.

- Straight across the top and just completely eliminated the upper canopy.

Alright, let me grab my pole pruner here.

Let's work on these tips.

Now, when I prune the upper outer canopy, I just wanna remove these, the old seed pods.

I'm just reaching up, cutting some of these back, now these... these are definitely going to put out growth when they come back out.

- Okay.

- And I still, - Clean cuts on those.

- And I still may need to come back and take some more off.

This one's broke, so let's cut it right there.

And I'm not just randomly cutting, I'm trying to cut it at a node, which a node is a point of where your buds break.

Let's see, I'm taking some of these off completely.

[pole saw clanking] The one thing about crape myrtles is most of the time they're planted in the wrong place.

- Right.

- And they have to be maintained like that.

- Right.

- Because otherwise it's just gonna grow into the house, under the gutter, under the soffit, and cause damage to your home.

- And what about our chutes down here at the bottom too?

- We're gonna eliminate those.

I wanna get rid of these two stubs.

[saw rasping] Using my hand saw.

Again, keep the blade away from you.

- Yeah.

[Wes grunting] [saw rasping] - Wes, I think you've done this a time or two.

- A few times.

- Man.

[saw rasping] Well you do a good job of that.

- Thank you.

[saw rasping] There we go.

- Wow.

Looks like a totally different tree, right?

- Yes, and now look, I got very little debris in comparison to what we would've had if we just taken it all the way off.

And I think it looks much better.

- Yeah, I guess we do have these shoot down here too.

- Oh yeah.

- You knock those out for us.

- Yeah, these are the sucker sprouts.

Yeah, so you wanna get these as low as you can get 'em.

- Now those keep coming back.

What's the best way to, you know, get 'em to slow down or get 'em to not come back?

You know, we get that question a lot.

You just have-- - Personally from my experience, when these sprout up during the summertime, cut 'em off then.

- Cut 'em off.

- It's not so apt to grow back.

And so if a part of the tree does not produce energy like the rest of it, it'll start slowing down and eventually you hope for it to stop putting out like that.

- Okay, good enough.

- And these, if they're not cut down low enough, they're definitely gonna grow back.

- Oh yes, I've seen that.

- And you can tell also by all these knots down here, that there's been a lot of this grow back.

But this is how I feel like they should be pruned.

- Remember, we love to hear from you.

Send us an email or letter.

The email address is questions@familyplotgarden.com and the mailing address is Family Plot, 7151 Cherry Farms Road, Cordova, Tennessee 38016.

Or you can go online to familyplotgarden.com.

That's all we have time for today.

Thanks for watching.

If you want to learn more about pruning, head on over to familyplotgarden.com.

We have lots of videos with pruning tips, both for shrubs, trees, and even fruit.

Be sure to join us next week for The Family Plot: Gardening in the Mid-South.

Be safe.

[upbeat country music] [acoustic guitar chords]