How to Prevent Crimes Against Nature with Plant Amnesty

Episode Description

In this episode of The Evergreen Thumb, we sit down with Keith Dekker, a Master Gardener and PlantAmnesty volunteer. He guides us through how to prune plants to prevent crimes against nature. Keith explains the best seasons to prune as well as gives a warning for when not to prune plants. He gives practical tips on what tools to use and how to take care of them.

Keith gives listeners an introduction to PlantAmnesty and explains their mission and founder Cass Turnbull’s sense of humor, and tells us about how he became involved in PlantAmnesty. He shares pruning resources to help listeners take care of their pruning needs in ways that prevent crimes against nature.

Keith has worked in the horticultural industry for almost 50 years including garden centers, greenhouses, nurseries, and in landscape maintenance. For the last 27 years, he had his own business, focusing on the care of residential properties in the Pacific Northwest, mainly focusing on pruning. He is now deeply involved with the Clallam County Master Gardeners, dividing his time between their 3-acre demonstration garden in Sequim, teaching classes and workshops, and the many facets of The Master Gardener program.

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Transcript for Prevent Crimes Against Nature

[00:00:01] Erin Landon: Welcome to episode 21 of the Evergreen Thumb. My guest today is Keith Dekker, and he’s here to talk to us about PlantAmnesty and, um, what they advocate for best pruning practices. Keith has worked in the Horticultural industry for almost 50 years, including garden centers, greenhouses, nurseries, and landscape maintenance.

For the last 27 years, he’s had his own business focusing on the care of residential properties in the Pacific Northwest, mainly focusing on pruning. He’s deeply involved with the Clallam County Master Gardener program, dividing his time between the three-acre demonstration garden in Sequim, teaching classes and workshops, and the many facets of an active group like Extension Master Gardeners.

He is also a long-time member of PlantAmnesty, which is based in Seattle. Keith, thanks for joining me today. Welcome to the show.

[00:00:54] Keith Dekker: Thanks, Erin.

[00:00:55] Erin Landon: So let’s start off by having you tell us a little bit about yourself and your experience as a gardener.

[00:01:02] Keith Dekker: Well, I grew up in Chicago, uh, moved to, uh, Colorado when I was in my early twenties, and then eventually moved to Seattle in 1990.

I’ve been involved in horticulture pretty much along the whole way. My first job in Chicago was in an inner-city garden center and florist. That was very interesting. Uh, and so over the Colorado and Washington state, I have been in greenhouses, nurseries, garden centers, um, landscape maintenance. So I’ve kind of touched on a little bit of everything and luckily you pick up a few things along the way.

You’re not always paying attention, but, uh, some things rub off. So, once I was in Seattle, I started my own business, working on landscapes at residential homes. And I did that for roughly 23 years on my own. Moved out to the Olympic Peninsula eight years ago. Continued to do it. I’m trying to retire.

Um, that’s not working so well. I joined the local Master Gardeners, the Clallam County Master Gardeners in 2017. And it’s a great group of folks. And so I’m very busy with them as well. So I’m getting to the point where I don’t have time to actually work for clients because I’m doing so much with the Master Gardeners, but that’s, that’s good.

[00:02:32] Erin Landon: All right. So I’m assuming, uh, while you were in Seattle is when you got involved with PlantAmnesty.

[00:02:38] Keith Dekker: Yes, I did. I was working for a nursery at the time. Uh, it took a couple of years, and I worked at a retail nursery. I was in their little dingy lunchroom and, uh, bored and looking through the stack of magazines on the table for something to read and there was the PlantAmnesty newsletter.

So I was reading that and, it was pretty hilarious. Um, and there was another one. So I dug that one out. It was just really funny. And I thought, well, this sounds like a good group of people to meet and they’re local. And so I looked up one of their meetings and, and went to one of the meetings and I thought it was really fun, great folks.

Then that’s where it all started. It just kept going for years and years and years. Uh, it turns out that that sense of humor, uh, was Cass Turnbull, the founder of PlantAmnesty. And, um, she’s the one that directed, that, that group. She founded it back in 1987. So I was probably reading that newsletter about 1996.

So that’s about the time I joined. And, um, she had me on the board in no time. She had me on committees. She had a real talent for talking people into things that they didn’t think they were ready for. And so, uh, yeah, that’s where it started.

About PlantAmnesty

[00:04:03] Erin Landon: Let’s talk about what, uh, PlantAmnesty does and what their mission is.

[00:04:09] Keith Dekker: Yep. So, um, originally Cass Turnbull named it PlantAmnesty because the name made her laugh. And so it was kind of on a little whim that she came up with this. And, uh, years later, here we are, and the numbers are about 1,200 members in 46 states and five countries. So it really did take off. Um, its mission is to provide education, resources, and advocacy to prevent mal-pruning and preserve urban green spaces.

Now Cass’ original, um, mission was to end the senseless torture and mutilation of trees and shrubs. You know, which I also got a smile from folks, but it made a lot of sense because that’s where that’s where it began.

She worked for the Seattle Park System, uh, department for about 11 years. And, uh, she rode around with John Turnbull, who eventually became her husband, and he would point out mal-pruned trees all over the place and shrubs, and he’d go, oh, that really hurts.

She got to, uh, feel the same way about things, and finally, she was doing it more than he was. And he said, listen, you know, quit complaining, do something about it. She said, okay, I’m going to start, I’m going to start something here. So she did. And so this, this group continues to, uh, move ahead. Uh, they use public media to, uh, alert the public to what they call crimes against nature in their own backyards, specifically tree topping and the nuisance pruning of shrubs where you see everything sheared beyond recognition.

Once they get their attention, then they have solutions and that’s a referral service of skilled gardeners and arborists. They offer classes and workshops. They have instructional YouTube videos. You can still go see Cass talking about things. And then they have a lot of how-to literature on selective pruning, both in English and Spanish.

[00:06:15] Erin Landon: Nice. Well, we’ll definitely link to their YouTube channel so people can check out some of those videos.

[00:06:21] Keith Dekker: PlantAmnesty has a Facebook page, but you can go to www.plantamnesty.org and access all their information.

[00:06:29] Erin Landon: Tell us a little bit more about Cass.

[00:06:32] Keith Dekker: So I was drawn to PlantAmnesty by, uh, by Cass’ sense of humor, um, and, you know, she had a lot of what we call Cass-isms, things that, that I still repeat to this day.

One of them is to wander, ponder, and prune. So don’t just go in there without a clue. Just, you know, walk around that tree or that shrub, wander and ponder, and then go in there and do your work. She would also say, uh, well, she came up with the term malpruning, which is like malpractice. And um, every time I type that into a message, uh, the computer says this is an incorrect spelling. I don’t know this word.

Well, it’s a word. We use it all the time. She would also say that, if plants died after we malprune them or pruned them incorrectly, we would learn the correct way in a hurry. You know, they don’t, they still leaf out. You, you butcher that tree and you go, oh no, it’s okay. It got leaves this year. I didn’t kill it. I must’ve done it right. Well, no, you didn’t.

So with the flower and garden show in Seattle, uh, we would always have a booth there. Uh, we would give lots of, uh, helpful advice. We would have all of our literature there, but we’d also have all these photographs on the board there behind us of all these butchered plants.

And it was the, um, the Pruning Horrors Hall of Shame, and we also had the Ugly Yard contest where she would have people send in photos of just butchered plants and trees around their neighborhood, and then we would, we would make an award for the best, best or worst, I guess.

So, she also authored, uh, her book, uh, Cass Turnbull’s Guide to Pruning. It’s in its third edition. It is still a real go-to book. I see that book recommended a lot of times when I go to different sites on pruning, and there it is. She did cover most of the shrubs that you’re going to find in your yard and talked about them specifically. She also talks about why you should prune it a certain way. If you don’t, what you’re going to end up with? And all the while using her, her sense of humor throughout.

[00:08:53] Erin Landon: Yeah, I have a copy of that book and it is, I really learned a lot. I liked the way she grouped like the different types of shrubs into categories, so you could kind of, have a general idea how to prune each type of shrub.

[00:09:07] Keith Dekker: Absolutely.

[00:09:07] Erin Landon: That was one of the big things I took away, but also the big thing I took away from that book was that, um, if you’re pruning, right, especially like on fruit trees, you don’t get water sprouts.

[00:09:18] Keith Dekker: Right? So, like in fruit trees, if you do a little summer pruning, you will break that routine of the water sprouts, because in the winter, if you just shave everything off, the plant has all this stored energy and now it’s going to want to replace everything you took off.

Boom. It’s all this water sprout growth and it’s all one year growth. It’s not going to produce fruit unless you leave some of that. Turns into two-year wood, gets fruit spurs, and bingo. But do a little summer pruning of some of those water sprouts that you’ve left. They’re not going to shoot up in the fall because the plant is actually headed toward dormancy at that time. So, you can, you work with the plants, um, and you can actually figure it out.

Those, uh, those groups of plants, the breaking plants into three groups, like the mounting habit shrubs, the cane growers, and then the tree-like shrubs really guides you towards how to prune them.

So, uh, the tree likes you treat them like trees. They get very little, uh, pruning. Um, the cane growers, things like hydrangeas, red twig dogwood, um, forsythia, you can prune them quite hard. You want to time it for the right time of year, just after the coldest part of the winter, but you can take quite a bit out of those as opposed to say the tree likes.

So you’ll get to know what your plants are and that kind of tells you how to prune them. I used to tell some customers, I say, well, I don’t really know what this is, but I know how to prune it, because of the structure of the plant. Then they kind of look at you and go, hmm, did I hire the right guy? So, yeah.

Key Principles for Maintaining Healthy, Well-Pruned Landscapes

[00:11:00] Erin Landon: Okay. So what are some of the key principles that PlantAmnesty advocates for maintaining healthy landscapes and well-pruned plants?

[00:11:11] Keith Dekker: Well, you know, a lot of it goes back to basics and the first thing is right plant right place. If you plant a plant in the correct spot, it’s not going to require a lot of pruning.

So, you put it in its area. You don’t put the tree next to the house. You don’t put 12-foot growing shrubs in front of your windows that you’re going to want to see out of. So, um. The reason a lot of folks prune is because they planted things in the wrong place, or they had no idea this was going to get as big as it was, or they overplanted.

There’s a lot of over-planting because we want to see things looking good. By lunchtime, we look out the window and go, that’s beautiful. And then in two or three years, we’re going, it’s a mess. I’ve got to prune all those things away from each other. And so on. I remember going to a customer’s house and they proudly showed me a little planting bed next to their front door.

And he said, what do you think? And I said, Oh, nice. A little four-by-four bed right by the door. And they had planted seven Leyland Cypress trees. Well, those get to be pretty big, maybe a hundred feet tall and almost as wide. And I said, those are beautiful, but you need to pull all those out and put them somewhere else.

But they were cute at the nursery and, uh, you know, that’s why we call it a nursery because they’re all little babies out there. And they either didn’t have a tag on them or they believed the tag because a lot of tags don’t tell the complete truth. So that was another thing I learned from Cass. Don’t believe the tag.

[00:12:50] Erin Landon: Yeah, I’ve learned along similar lines that the mature size is not, doesn’t mean it stops growing.

[00:12:58] Keith Dekker: No. And, when folks plant, they want, they want a fast-growing plant Evergreen because they want to screen out their neighbor’s garage. So they want something that grows in a hurry. So you say, well, there’s a Leyland Cypress that grows three to four feet a year.

Oh, perfect. But it’s not going to grow up to the roof line of that garage and stop. It’s going to continue three to four feet a year until it gets to be a monster. So if you’re not paying attention and pruning it, uh, right away, when it gets to where you want it, You’ll have to come back later and hire those guys with the lift truck and they’re gonna come in there. It’s gonna be a much more expensive job than it was when they were younger.

Different Types of Pruning Cuts

So, right plant, right place. That’s, that’s kind of the basis, but then you get into, understanding a plant’s response to the cuts you’re going to make. We pretty much deal in two basic cuts. You’ve got the heading cut, which is where you just basically cut the head off of a branch, um, removing that apical bud.

And what happens when you do that? You stimulate the buds underneath your cut. So now you’re going to get about, eh, three to four shoots coming out right below your cut. If that’s what you’re after, great. If you’re trying to generate more branches on that side of the plant, or if it’s a fruit tree, and you’re trying to get more growth out of it, there you go.

But if that’s not what you want to do, and you’re just trying to shorten your plant, then you don’t want to use a heading cut. You want to use what we call a branch removal cut, or what, uh, has been known as thinning cuts. And you cut to another branch, you cut to something, you leave something, not just dormant buds.

And then the energy can then go into that branch and the growth will be much more contained and you won’t have to deal with a lot of excess growth or water sprouts or that type of thing. If you end up using the branch removal cut more often, you’ll find that you’re doing less pruning every year. I mean, there are, fruit trees that I go back to, or Japanese maples and you look at them and you go, I can walk right past that tree now. It’s good. It’s good this year. I don’t have to do anything. So that’s, that’s kind of nice. And that is just using the correct cuts. So that’s really what they promote.

Cass’ Anti Tree-Topping Campaign

One subject that Cass started with was tree topping. There was a lot of tree topping and she had quite the campaign. We ended up with billboards. We went on TV. She went and spoke all over the state and other states, and it really did make a difference. There were a lot of arborists that started to join PlantAmnesty. Started to become, uh, certified arborists and learning why you should do some types of pruning and not on others. We started to really gain on that. Unfortunately, it seems like things have changed a bit.

I still see tree topping, uh, quite a bit. We also see a lot of shearing, all this excess shearing of everything. PlantAmnesty would always teach how to prune without having to shear. Use the grab and snip method, selective pruning. If you selectively prune a flowering shrub, it doesn’t matter what time of year you prune it because you’re selectively pruning it. You’re leaving flower buds. If you’re shearing it, well, yes, it does matter. You better shear right after bloom. Otherwise, you’re not going to get bloom next year.

I think the shearing epidemic has increased with the increase of power tools and now battery-operated power tools where all these crews can just go out there and you don’t have to know what a plant is to work on a landscape crew, but you do need to know your shapes. Circles, and squares, and they obviously know those, those shapes. So that’s what they do. They just make circles and squares out of everything. It’s sometimes comical. If you’re not going to cry, you come up to something and go, “Oh my God, that’s a Japanese maple”. That ball on the stick is a Japanese maple. I have pictures of all of this stuff.

The other day I was at a store and they had planted salal on the shady side of the building. Well, salal works in the shade. It’s considered ground cover, although it’s kind of a big ground cover, and grows in the forest here.

The crew must’ve come up against that and gone, those are kind of unruly. And they turned them into round balls and a hedge. And it’s like, you’re kidding.

[00:17:58] Erin Landon: …It’s a native plant.

[00:17:58] Keith Dekker: It’s completely wrong for the plant and the plant will sit there for a while and put up with it until it rolls over and dies and then they’ll put something else in there.

But, yeah, we call that parking lot pruning. Unfortunately, a lot of folks see that, and they bring that home. And, you know, Dad just got that, power tool for Christmas and he’s eager to try it out. So, yeah, unfortunately, there’s a lot of that still going on.

Repairing or Renovating Plants that Have Been Shorn

[00:18:24] Erin Landon: Is there a way to correct or, um, revitalize a plant that’s been shorn?

[00:18:33] Keith Dekker: It depends on the plant. So yeah, the answer is yes. There are quite a few plants that you can repair or renovate. It depends on what type of plant they are. So you go back to the types and if it’s a cane grower, say you have a hydrangea that’s been a ball for years and you just moved there and you inherited this, this poor shrub, you can take that down radically in the early spring, late winter, cut it pretty much to the ground and start over.

You won’t have any blooms for a season and maybe two, but if you don’t continue shearing it, it’ll turn back into its more natural state. So, there are plants you can deal with that way. Some plants, if they butchered a tree so heavily, you may want to just remove it and you know, that’d be a harder thing to do.

But with topped trees, you know, they will produce the water sprouts because they’re trying to replace what you took off. If you leave those water sprouts on for some years, they will actually continue to branch. The weight will make them curve a little bit. They’ll turn into more natural branches. So the tree could recover its, we’ll say its original look.

Unfortunately, when branches are stimulated via water sprouts, they are poorly connected to the tree. So they are more likely to break off with snow load or winds or something like that. So, it’s not the best thing, but you can, if you leave a tree alone and let those water sprouts develop, it can develop into branches again.

Water Sprouts vs. Suckers

[00:20:16] Erin Landon: One thing I just thought of, because we’ve been talking about water sprouts, but a lot of people tend to refer to them as suckers. Or so I thought we might mention that there is a difference. Water sprouts come off of a branch whereas the suckers come from the ground level, right?

[00:20:33] Keith Dekker: So the suckers will come up from the ground and especially if you have a grafted plant like roses or some trees are grafted and if those suckers are coming up from the ground around your tree, they’re not coming out of the trunk, but they’re coming out next to it. It’s probably the rootstock and it won’t be the same plant as what you purchased and planted.

So, in the spring you’ll see some flowering plums that will be pink and white. And you go, oh, that’s interesting. Uh, they don’t sell them that way. What happened is some suckers came up and intermingled in there. You didn’t really notice it. And when it blooms, you go, oh, it’s got different colored flowers, which is okay. Except that suckers do eventually take over. The rootstock is quite strong. They will take over the rest of that tree or rose. A lot of times the roses will revert to rootstock and that top, that rose that you purchased for its fragrance and its color will slowly decline while the suckers take off.

So it’s good to pay attention to where they’re coming from. Water sprouts are up there on the branches. They are a response to your pruning.

Common Pruning Mistakes

[00:21:48] Erin Landon: So aside from shearing, what others are some other common pruning mistakes?

[00:21:54] Keith Dekker: Well, a mistake that a lot of folks make when they’re removing a branch from say a tree, uh, or a large shrub is they know what they want to do. They’ve got the tool and they just make it in one cut. The problem with that is most times there’s too much weight on that branch. When you make that final cut close to the trunk, it strips down the bark as it falls. So what you do is you take the weight of that branch off first. So you make a three-step cut.

You’d make a little notch about a foot away from the trunk on the branch, on the underside of the branch. Then your second cut is on top of that. Boom. The branch snaps off and it’s out of the way. It falls on the ground. You’ve got a one-foot piece of branch left on the tree. Now you can make a nice, concise cut and not have it stripped down the tree.

So that’s something I see a lot of, they just either don’t know that or they’re just figuring, well, this time it’s not going to happen. Well, I’ve tried that in the past and you regret you didn’t take the time to do it. The other thing is. You need to pay attention to where the branch collar is on your tree.

Don’t make a flush cut on the tree or you’re going to open that tree to rot. You’re actually wounding the tree itself, the trunk. Whereas if you come out a little way and leave that little bump that sticks out from the trunk. The tree can deal with that wound, much, much better.

You know, pruning is wounding a plant. All those cuts that we make, wound the plant. You know, a lot of folks say, oh, the plant feels so much better now that you’re finished. And I’m like, no, it doesn’t. If you could hear it scream, but, uh, you know, we’re wounding the tree. The other people like to say, oh, look, thank you for giving my plants a haircut.

You know, Cass used to say, well, you know, if our hair grew like, uh, like the plants, um, it, it would grow much faster and all the ends would be split out, you know, all of the branches because they’d be splitting out all those, those buds would be stimulated. So cut outside of the branch collar, leave a small bump, and don’t make a flush cut.

If you leave a little stub, it’s not the worst thing in the world. It’s actually better than if you made a flush cut and cut into the trunk. Later you’ll see that stub starting to die off and you’ll usually see where it’s going to die off too. It’ll die off just outside of that branch collar, and then you can finish your cut, you know, next year or whatever.

Tools for the Best Results

You always want to use really good quality tools. It is surprising how many people try to prune with really poor tools. They don’t pick them up very often. So they don’t think about it that often. Some of them have been sitting outside, rusting, even Master Gardeners come in and they’ll say, hey, could you teach me how to do this?

And they bring out their loppers and I’ll go, oh my gosh, you know, buy yourself a good tool. So, I always tell people when you go to a shop for tools, it should hurt a little bit. It should hurt you in the pocketbook. That means you’re buying something that probably is made of good materials, it’ll hold an edge better, it’ll be easier on your body, because, a dull tool is just a lot more work and you’re going to have tired muscles from trying to make that work and you’re also not going to have any fun.

You’re just going to go, “Ugh this thing, I don’t like this tool” and go do something else. So buy good tools and you know, those hand pruners are made with really bright red handles so that you don’t lose them. Well, people still lose them or they set them on the fence post or they put them on the yard waste bin and they fall in and then they go off, you know, when the guy picks up the yard waste.

If you buy yourself a scabbard or a pouch that fits on your belt or clips on your, on the waist of your pants, you will save a lot of money by not losing all those good pruners. That’s what, that’s what I’ve done. I’ve got one that looks really, really old cause it’s been with me for many, many years, but I don’t lose my hand pruners that way.

Buying Quality Tools and Caring for Them for Better Cuts

[00:26:19] Erin Landon: So one thing I’ve heard, and you can tell me if this is correct or not for loppers or pruners having a bypass blade is better.

Keith Dekker: Absolutely.

Erin Landon: Because it makes cleaner cuts.

[00:26:29] Keith Dekker: Yes. Yes. So it needs to be a bypass pruner. Both your loppers and your hand pruner should be bypass, and what that means is the blades go past each other like scissors, and that makes a really good cut.

There’s another type of, uh, pruner called an anvil pruner. And it has a blade that goes down on a flatbed. Many times the bark of the plant does not cut completely and it tears. If you leave a ragged cut on your plants, it can lead to more disease and other problems. So good, clean cuts help the plant deal with those wounds that you’re doing.

[00:27:08] Erin Landon: Yeah. I think I heard one time that with those anvil styles, if they’re not sharp, they’ll just crush the plant material, which then again, it’s not like you said, it’s not a clean cut.

[00:27:19] Keith Dekker: Nope. Some folks will use those for cut flowers and so on. I just, I never liked them.

You know, everybody’s got their favorites, but if you have a good sharp bypass pruner, you’ll see the difference. The other thing is to occasionally sharpen it. Clean it off a little bit. You can use something like Lysol just isopropyl alcohol to soak it a little bit. You know, I just spray it on.

Then I’ll use a little scrubby like they have those kitchen scrubbies to take off the gunk. Once that’s off, I’ll maybe sharpen it a little bit. I’ll use a very fine file to put an edge on that blade and you only sharpen the one blade, and you sharpen it on one side. Then you put a little bit of lubricant on it. It’s like a new, new pruner.

It’s amazing. You say, why didn’t I do this before? Some of the lubricants they now have, I buy one that’s a plant-based lubricant. It lasts so much longer than those petroleum-based ones do. Then you don’t have the mess as well. So I do that occasionally.

Sometimes if I’m with a customer or a Master Gardener. They’ll have their tool and I’ve got my truck with my stuff in it. I’ll go here, just a minute. I’ll run through it real quick and tell them what I’m doing and hand it back to them. They’re just amazed at how much better that tool is.

So, buy good tools and take care of them.

Why Should You Limb Up Your Trees?

[00:28:47] Erin Landon: So how does limbing up a tree affect the health of the tree or its overall function?

[00:28:55] Keith Dekker: Well, the reason for limbing up a tree can be a couple of things. One is access. You know, you’re tired of hitting your head when you’re mowing around that tree. Um, you’ve got people moving around, there’s a sidewalk, there’s children playing.

You wanna get those branches out of the way. It also can be for the looks of the garden. Uh, it’s really nice to see past a tree. So instead of topping the tree and making it smaller, because this thing seems so big, limit up a little bit. You don’t have to deal with those higher branches and you can see past it.

So a lot of folks with a view, they say, oh, that tree’s in the way. Well, the tree is part of the view. So maybe limb it up a little bit, maybe take off a few crossing branches and lighten it up a little bit, and you can still have your view and then you still have a tree.

When a tree is very young and you’ve just planted it, you don’t want to take all those lower branches off right away, even though you will eventually. Because those branches are feeding the trunk of that tree, so it can actually adversely affect uh, the growth of that tree if you take and strip everything off except for those high branches because that’s what you’re, you’re going to keep down the road. So you can slowly limb those trees up as need be.

Special Considerations for Evergreens

[00:30:17] Erin Landon: So one thing that I heard, and maybe you can tell me if this has been your experience, is that particularly with Evergreens, if you’re limbing them up, it can affect the ability of those lower branches to handle a snow load.

[00:30:33] Keith Dekker: Yeah. So, Evergreens, and of course it depends on the Evergreen and what their growth habit is. Evergreens are more susceptible to snow load because they’re evergreen. They are going to catch more snow. Some Evergreens are more brittle than others.

You can have pines breaking with a snow load where some other, uh, conifers will not have that same effect. Douglas firs can snap with snow load, and it’ll just take all the branches. The branches will go bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, all the way down just because they’re a little bit more brittle as opposed to something like a Grand fir or a Hemlock or something like that.

So you want to always pay attention with your limbing up of what you’re leaving. Maybe you have to shorten some of those branches on the tree to compensate for what you’re doing, to kind of balance it out, and think about what the snow load is going to be, or are you going to give it space for the snow to go through it?

On Conifers, if you are pruning in the green zone where there’s active growth, it’ll usually be fine. But if you’re going back to what we call the dead zone or areas that are, have no green on them whatsoever, and you prune it back to there, it’s pretty much going to just die back to the tree. Conifers do not break bud like Deciduous trees do.

Deciduous trees, you can cut a tree down and it’ll send up, uh, sprouts for years and years and years until those roots die. A Conifer, you cut it off, it’s dead. It’s not going to break bud like that. So you think about that when you prune, uh, the branches of a Conifer. If you’re going to shorten them, uh, you want to cut back to the green area and try not to cut back further, otherwise, you’re going to have, uh, you’re going to show some dead branches.

Folks make that mistake with Junipers, you know, when they’re Junipers or small pines next to a walkway and it’s been eating the sidewalk for some years and they go, well, you know, We got to get our sidewalk back or there’s a new owner that shows up and they say where’s the sidewalk?

So now they cut that juniper back about four feet into it and it’s a dead zone and they usually when they do that, they just buzz it straight, you know, right with the edge of the sidewalk and you’ll see about a three-foot dead section and then with a little green top and that dead section’s not going to resprout. You’re going to be looking at that for forever, well, as long as you live there.

So try to prune those plants away from your, uh, sidewalks much earlier when they’re much younger, and one of the tricks to doing that is to lift the branches off the walk, reach underneath, and cut those that are down below. Some of those branches are going to be the ones that go furthest out to your sidewalk. Remove those. And then when you let the branches down, you’ll see, oh, it still looks natural. All my cuts are hidden.

I can go ahead and finesse that edge now without, um, making it look really bad. So the trick is to cut, if you’re going to be making pruning cuts, make them earlier rather than later. The same goes with trees and shrubs. If you’re going to reduce the size of something, do it now while the cuts are small. Don’t wait until you’re making really large cuts, three or four inches across, because then the tree or shrub is going to have a real hard time dealing with those big cuts.

Timing Pruning for Specific Plants

[00:34:07] Erin Landon: So we talked a little bit about fruit trees and doing some summer cuts to help prevent water sprouts.

Are there other timings specific for certain types of plants to make cuts?

[00:34:20] Keith Dekker: Yeah, most of your pruning is done well on Deciduous plants. Most times you’re going to be pruning during the dormant season. The leaves are off. You can see the structure of the plant. It’s easier to figure it out at that time.

Or the spring when plants are starting in their active growth and you want things to branch out or get it off your driveway, that type of thing. Spring is usually the time to do that. If you’re doing summer pruning, and you’re pruning after the longest day. So say you’re pruning after July 4th, you’ll have very little growth happening after that.

So with a hedge that is very vigorous, you pretty much only want to prune it once a year. You’d rather not be out there several times. So, if you wait until after the longest day and then prune it, it’s pretty much going to stay there until next year. If you prune it in April, it’s going to bust bud and take off and by the end of the summer, it’s going to be unruly again. And you’re going to go, I’m going to have to go back out there and do it again.

So, if you can be patient, let it have its flush of growth and then go out and prune it, it’ll stay much longer. You can also use that technique with other shrubs and so on when, with the longer days, you’ll get a lot less growth after that.

So, fruit trees, we do summer pruning and we do summer pruning in late July and in early August. And what we’re doing is we’re reducing some of the water sprout growth that there is in there. We’re also pruning some of the excess foliage away so that the fruit can ripen. It’ll get more sunlight, more airflow, and fewer issues with insects and disease. And then if you look at that tree in the winter, you’ll go, oh, there’s not near as much to do. If you do those two prunings with the fruit trees, you’ll find that you’re doing a lot less than you used to.

[00:36:19] Erin Landon: Yeah. I find summer pruning too, is a good time to cut out deadwood at the same time because you can actually see.

[00:36:27] Keith Dekker: Yes. So, if you do this all the time, you get to recognize dead wood really easily. But if you don’t, it’s really hard to tell what’s dead and what’s not. So, in the summer after things leaf out or in the spring after things leaf out, you’ll be able to see what’s dead and what’s not.

Also, if you don’t know, you scratch a little bit of bark away with your hand pruner, and if it’s green, just wait. You know, we had some severe cold weather this last winter here in Western Washington, and a lot of plants, got hit very hard. So it’s a common topic of conversation with homeowners about what they lost some of those plants will come back and some of them won’t but the big message is to be patient because in the next few weeks with the gradual warming of the temperatures, we’ll know what’s alive and what isn’t and the plant will show it to you and then you can say alright yeah, that’s worth keeping.

I’ll prune it to the live and let it continue or it’s starting to sprout at the very ground level and you say, well, no, I’m not going to wait for that to get big again.

[00:37:36] Erin Landon: We lost like, well, we think we lost three Escallonia with that deep freeze.

[00:37:41] Keith Dekker: Oh, yeah.

[00:37:42] Erin Landon: I’m waiting to rip them out until I’m sure they’re not gonna leaf out.

[00:37:48] Keith Dekker: So yeah, top of the list is Escallonia. Everybody’s Escallonia froze down and it’s going to depend on how established your roots are as to whether that’s going to come back. So, if they weren’t very established, it could have killed it all the way. If they are established, cut off all the dead, which is probably going to go to ground level. And if it starts to sprout from the base, it could come back fairly strong with a good-sized root mass.

Ceanothus, all over town, uh, dead to the ground. The jury’s still out on whether any of that’s going to come back. I’m going to take a look at some tomorrow, somebody described and see what they look like, but you can imagine homeowners that had a huge screen of Ceanothus or Escallonia dividing them from their neighbors or whatever. It’s all brown now, just shot. So, you know, a lot of these plants are on the northern edge of their range. We’re kind of lucky that we’ve been able to grow them this long, but it kind of wakes us up and says, well, you know, maybe that’s not the best choice.

It may not happen for another 33 years, but maybe it’s going to happen next year again. So it’s up to you whether you want to, uh, continue to use those plants.

[00:39:12] Erin Landon: Fortunately, all our Ceanothus seem to have made it. Really? Just the Escallonia, yeah. And they were pretty young. So.

[00:39:19] Keith Dekker: Wow. So where, where do you live?

[00:39:22] Erin Landon: I am in Southwest Washington in the Chehalis River Valley.

[00:39:25] Keith Dekker: Okay.

[00:39:26] Erin Landon: So, um, I’m south of you by about two or three hours.

[00:39:31] Keith Dekker: So how cold did you get?

[00:39:33] Erin Landon: Um, upper teens.

[00:39:35] Keith Dekker: Okay. We had a lot of single digits here. And, um, that’s really rare. I just, I don’t think I’ve ever seen single digits like that. What happened was it sat on us for two days at their lowest point. And that was enough to really do in a lot of these plants. So, um, it’ll be interesting to see what comes out of it. I continue to look at some plants and they are slowly looking a little worse every time I see them. So I don’t know where this dead zone is going to stop if some of these are going to come back or not.

So yeah, we just have to wait and see.

Techniques to Rejuvenate Overgrown Plants

[00:40:11] Erin Landon: So what are some techniques we can use to rejuvenate, um, overgrown or neglected plants?

[00:40:18] Keith Dekker: Well, sometimes, when somebody says, you know, “I’ve got a bunch of old Japanese maples and I’ve never pruned them”. I start to salivate because I’d rather hear that than, “Oh, I’ve been keeping those short for years”, you know, cause then they’re just going to be a mess.

If they haven’t done anything and they’ve just been neglected, then it’s just a matter of deadwood, which is a really therapeutic thing to do, is just to go out and do deadwood. Or you’ve got some crossing branches, maybe you’re limbing things up, but you can work with it. You have something to work with.

Maybe you go in there and pull out all of the surrounding plants because they don’t need to be there anymore, and you’re trying to show this beautiful tree that’s hidden in there. That’s kind of a nice thing. If the plants are, uh, really mal-pruned, it really comes down to what kind of plant they are.

So you can renovate those cane growers. If there are mounding shrubs, you have to make a determination, is it worth it or not? Some of them, you can just leave them to grow out of that shearing. They’ll start to form branches again. Unfortunately, when you shear a plant, the inside is dead. If you spread it open, you look inside, it’s all dead. The reason is it doesn’t get any more sunlight because of all those little heading cuts that you’ve been using with the shears. So if you ignore that and let that plant grow out, it can actually look a little bit natural down the road, but it may take a while.

Others are just, you just say, I’m sorry, but that’s too ugly. Life is short. I’m gonna plant something that I really like and pull that one out. So it could be a mixed bag. It could be a real mixed bag.

[00:42:08] Erin Landon: I had someone send me a picture of a sheared tree and asked me what it was and I’m looking at it I’m like, I’m really not sure because it was all sticks and I think it was like a dogwood of some kind or something and I’m like, “just replace it”, because he had just moved into this property.

So I’m like, “You might as well just put in something you really want”.

[00:42:27] Keith Dekker: Exactly. It would take years for that tree to come out of it. And maybe it will never would. Maybe they really impacted the health of that tree and it’s a slow, slow, slow decline. And you know, why watch that out your window?

It becomes very hard to identify a lot of plants that are sheared. Um, I’ll look at plants outside somebody’s house and go, well, I know that’s a holly. I know that’s an escallonia. I don’t know what that is, I don’t know what that is. Because all of the character has been taken off. So that really nice, uh, leaf texture that you, you saw at the nursery, uh, no longer does that because you’re, you’re shearing it heavily.

It doesn’t really bloom anymore. So you can’t use that as an ID. It becomes difficult. They’re just little green blobs. And, um, that really wasn’t the intent, you know, there’s a real disconnect between either what the homeowner had intended. And now they share because maybe the tools got to be more fun.

I don’t know. In the landscape, say it’s a commercial landscape, there was a landscaper that designed that with texture, color, um, Evergreen, Deciduous. They had reasons for it. Uh, this is going to grow tall. This is going to cover the ground and so on. And then years later, a different manager is caring for it or not caring for it and has a crew out there with their machines and there is no longer any resemblance from that original plan. It’s really a shame. I hope that the landscaper doesn’t live there anymore and doesn’t go by there every day on his way to work.

[00:44:11] Erin Landon: So one of my bigger pet peeves is when this, a lot of the smaller cities that don’t have actual landscaping crews, and it’s just, you know like our city has two people. We’re really tiny town. Um, and none of them have any landscape experience really. And we have these beautiful flowering cherry trees in town and they just butcher them like every two or three years.

[00:44:38] Keith Dekker: You should go talk to them. Just say, you know, um, and what I see also is flowering, spring flowering trees like a flowering cherries or flowering plums. They come out early. They’re really the only reason to have those trees out there because you’re not producing fruit in a flowering cherry. The flowering plums don’t produce fruit. So it’s the flowers. And a lot of times the crews are pruning them before they flower, or while they’re in flower, they’re driving down the road to dump off the branches and all the flowers are flying out the back of their pickup truck.

And you go, come on, give it three or four weeks before you go in there. Let them bloom. And then do some of your pruning, but, um, they really don’t know it’s on their schedule and those trees look kind of wild. So they, they are out there to contain them. I think it’s worth talking to some people. It’s hard not to sometimes, um, I, I keep myself from walking into buildings and going, did you pay somebody to do that?

But, um, I think with city caretakers, they would probably appreciate a little bit of education, uh, and just say, “You know what, you actually can do less work by doing it this way than the way you’re doing it”.

Suggestions for Garden Resources from PlantAmnesty

[00:45:53] Erin Landon: So does PlantAmnesty have any resources for like how to approach cities or city governments?

[00:46:02] Keith Dekker: Well, they’ve worked with the city of Seattle for quite a while on their tree ordinance. They do have a referral service with licensed arborists, which is a good resource. If you had an arborist who came out just to talk to you about pruning practices and paid them for their time you’d learn a lot.

You could also have some of them do the work, but that’s a great resource. You also have licensed gardeners that are out there with a lot of knowledge and they could help guide people. They not only do the physical work, but sometimes they do what’s called garden coaching. Uh, the homeowner really would like to do some of the work, but they’re kind of clueless as to how to approach it.

So you really want to use these folks as a resource because they have a lot of knowledge. And those ISA certified arborists, they’re very much up on their current practices.

Final Thoughts on Pruning or How to Prevent Crimes Against Nature?

[00:47:01] Erin Landon: Is there anything else that you would like to add about pruning or PlantAmnesty?

[00:47:06] Keith Dekker: We talked earlier about the time of year for pruning.

I just wanted to mention that there’s winter pruning, spring pruning, and summer pruning, but don’t prune in the fall. Really shouldn’t be pruning anything in the fall. A lot of folks will try to tidy things up at the end there before they’re going to hibernate in the house and watch football all winter.

Don’t go out there and prune things hard in the fall because it’s going to generate young growth. Going into the coldest part of the year, you’ll lose more plant material that way than if you just wait until after the winter. So try to get all your pruning finished by August, and then also in the fall a lot of plants are stressed.

They’re drought-stressed, and you really shouldn’t be pruning hard on plants that are stressed. A lot of folks forget to water their plants. And when we get droughty periods, which we’re getting more and more of by the time fall rolls around a lot of your plants are very stressed, and the best thing you could do for them is give them a good drink of water.

[00:48:11] Erin Landon: Well, thank you so much for joining me. This is great pruning information, and I’m glad to share PlantAmnesty with gardeners in the area as well.

[00:48:21] Keith Dekker: Yeah, have them look up, their website. Um, they’re a lot of fun. You know, I looked up their website and it said, it starts out with, we have a sense of humor and we have a mission.

So they are, they are continuing the Cass Turnbull theme there, which is great.

[00:48:44] Erin Landon: Yeah, and we will link to their website and their YouTube channel and things like that, too. They have a lot of YouTube videos that are great.

[00:48:51] Keith Dekker: They are a lot of fun.

[00:48:53] Erin Landon: All right, and we’ll probably have some other, um, WSU publications on pruning as well.

[00:49:00] Keith Dekker: Well, I expect you to go after those two people that are pruning in your city and get them on the right track.