Bring those trees into workshop for help from Tim Kong, John Edwards, Lawrence LeClaire and others.

If you’ve been letting your trees grow this spring and summer you will probably be seeing a lot of new growth by this time.  Cleaning up trees is the next step.  Take a well refined juniper as a good example:  clean out foliage that doesn’t make up part of the outline of the branches.  Remove foliage that is hanging down and that has grown beyond the desired silhouette.  Thin the foliage farther than just to make the tree look good now, thin it so that as the tree starts to send out new growth in March of next year that it is then in the perfect state….for the show!
Maples and many other deciduous trees may have been cut back more than once already this season.  If you’ve been letting things run to fatten trunks, heal wounds, get longer branches or improve the health of the tree then think about cutting back now so that the tree has time to send out more growth before fall.   Taking my own advice, I recently cut a chinese elm back hard.  I had let the branches run to 6-8 inches beyond the silhouette of the tree.  The tree is strong, and now I have cuttings to make a grove.  I expect that it will bud out again before the fall, improving both the health and the ramification of the tree.

No Tags