In the Garden Articles

January Pruning Chores

by Joan S. Bolton

How can such a gloomy month offer such glorious opportunity in the garden?

January is arguably one of the least comfortable times to work outdoors. It's often chilly, damp and just plain gray.

But this month is also when roses, fruit trees and berries are as dormant as they'll ever be in our mild climate.

And that's where lies the opportunity.

Now is the drop-dead best time to prune. By taking up a sharp set of tools, you'll be priming your plants for peak performance later on. Besides, it's a task you can do when the ground is too muddy to work.

Pruning Roses

In most parts of the country, roses look dead this time of year. Yet on the South Coast, the shrubs barely go dormant.

Take everyone's favorite white shrub rose, Iceberg. The darned things just keep blooming. Mine have at least half a dozen beautiful flowers apiece right now. It may seem crazy to whack them back. But I know -- through the experience of a friend who couldn't bear to prune her year-old Icebergs -- that if I don't exact that rejuvenating trim, I'll have a tangled mess of spindly blooms by summer.

That's because roses bloom best on newer, fresher canes, and when sun penetrates the center of the bush.

When you prune, start by eliminating older canes that have turned gray, or are exceptionally thick and gnarled. They are well past their prime.

Then turn your attention to the younger, thinner, greener canes. Remove any that are misshapen or shoot from one side of the crown to the other.

Finally, selectively prune what's left. Canes that are at least as thick as a pencil will produce your best roses. For hybrid teas, try to end up with three to five canes that angle away from the crown to form a vase-like shape. For a floribunda, five to seven canes is fine.

Once you've cut the extras, trim the tips of the survivors.

How far depends on who's talking. Some say your roses should stand 18 to 36 inches after the final trim.

Others consider how tall the plant will be when it blooms, then prune to just below that mark. The theory is that pruning any further will force the rose to work all season to grow tall again, leaving little time or energy to produce the actual blooms.

A companion notion is that the higher you prune, the more bud eyes you expose, thereby delivering more flowers.

Whatever your approach, vary the heights of the canes on each bush, so that the flowers will bloom more randomly.

Also, be sure to cut at an angle just above and away from an outward facing bud. This helps guide new growth out, allowing sunlight to reach the crown, which activates the dormant bud eyes and prods the rose to produce more blooms. If the buds haven't broken through yet, look for small bumps or nodes that shift in color from green to pink or deep red as they swell.

Pruning Fruit Trees

That idea of exposing the crown to sunlight also applies to fruit trees.

However, their pruning is trickier, because they vary greatly as to how old the branches are before they bear fruit.

Peaches, for example, bear on the previous summer's wood. They benefit from a nearly maniacal pruning each year.

Apples, on the other hand, require little trimming as they mature, because they don't produce the same lanky whips of growth. Instead, they bear fruit on fuzzy nubs or spurs that form on wood at least a year old.

Those same spurs will produce fruit throughout the tree's lifetime, so some folks say to leave them alone. Others, however, recommend thinning the spurs every few years to encourage new, potentially more vigorous spurs.

Pears, plums and apricots also have their own idiosyncrasies, as do raspberries, boysenberries and blackberries.

The hands-down best resource for sorting out all of these vagaries is a slim paperback by R. Sanford Martin called How to Prune Fruit Trees. First published in 1944, it is an absolute must for anyone tackling fruit trees in southern California. It's available at most local nurseries. Sunset, Ortho and others also offer books on pruning fruit trees and berries.

The Kindest Cuts

Bypass or anvil? Clippers, loppers or pruning saws? Novice pruners can face bewildering choices when selecting tools.

Bypass hand clippers are generally the first piece of equipment that rose gardeners reach for. Bypass loppers work well on older, woodier canes that are an inch or more in diameter.

"Bypass" refers to a curved blade that swings past another blade as it slices, while anvil clippers have two straight edges that close against one another.

In general, bypass clippers leave the cleanest cut. Anvil clippers are better suited to cutting extremely hard or frozen wood: the opposable blades tend to mash softer limbs.

Loppers are simply long-handled clippers that improve your leverage so you can prune larger branches.

Crescent-shaped pruning saws are handy for clearing out fruit tree branches that are too big for loppers.