Tagged: Trees in Winter

The Annual Pruning Clinic

  Woody plants remain healthier, more productive and more beautiful with strategic, well-timed pruning.  Pruning young plants guides their growth into a strong and balanced structure.  Pruning older plants opens them up to sunlight and airflow, limiting the opportunities for disease to infect them.  Proper pruning can also rejuvenate them with new, more vigorous growth. Pruning wisely is both an art and a science.  Some homeowners and gardeners may have questions about how and when to prune the many shrubs...

Pruning: Dos and Don’ts

  Pruning woody shrubs is both art and science.  Selecting which branches to leave and which to remove allows a gardener to train a woody plant into a pleasing, balanced shape that fits the available space.  Some gardeners use pruning techniques to create neatly trimmed topiary, elegant hedges, or espaliered fruit trees.  Gardeners may also prune roots and branches and remove leaves and buds to train trees to live as bonsai in shallow containers.  Woody plants are extremely adaptable and...

The Beauty and Promise of Trees in Winter

  There is a special beauty in the form and structure of a bare tree after it has dropped its annual crop of leaves.  Like the beauty of a classical statue, one can see the truth of its bones.  Leaves, for all of their movement and color, veil the beauty of branches and buds. Looking at a bare tree is a study in pure potential.     All of the tree’s life  draws inwards to the wood and roots as...