Before you go grabbing all your tools and attacking your plants, I want to give you the basics on the pruning, shaping and sheering of shrubs.
They all grow in different sizes and shapes and they all really take different means of pruning. What really determines how you’re going to attend to a plant is the way that it grows and the size of its leaf. We cut this large leaf with the head sears, you have all these half leaves and they just look bad especially in a few days when those edges of those large cut leaves turn brown. Aesthetically, you really want to use the right tool, so pruning sears in this case. And I’m going to go in here and just make proper cuts were necessary, stub cuts where it’s fine to make some stubs cuts.
The difference between a proper cut and a stub cut is this. If I come in here, a proper cut would do a thinning cut and take it to the next branch. Or maybe I’ll take it to a leaflet. You’re cutting on a note or at a section of a new branch. Now stub cuts is a little different, a stub cut is just randomly cutting this wherever and maybe you’re going to leave a stub. What a stub cut is going to do is promote radical growth, more growth right here at this stub, here is one right here.
This plant was cut right there, that stub synched up all of this growth. On shrubs, the smaller leaves where the cuts are always noticeable, it is fine to just use some hedge trimmers. A hedge trimmer is designed so that this long blade cuts many branches at one time. Now, if you got a lot of trimming to do, maybe you got a whole hedgeof these shrubs planted, then you could use something like a gas-powered trimmer.
It’s important to understand the form and the fashion that a plant naturally wants to grow. Now this Escallonia wants to grow as a large sort of a round blob and that’s what we’ve got going here. So when I reduce the size of it, I’m just making a smaller round blob. When you cut a plant and you’ll make it just leveled on the sides, the top grows faster since it’s getting more sunlight, it tends to work just like a baseball cap, like a bill and actually shades out the bottoms side of it and that will not grow and there you go.
The more you know about your plants, the better you’ll be able to take care of those plants and give them what they need.
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