This past month I have been studying various pruning techniques used on small trees and shrubs. My hope is that by studying, practicing, and now teaching it to others, I will better prepare my abilities when I put it into practice in my bonsai hobby.
Small garden trees and shrubs are a bit easier to practice on than small bonsai. Small trees grown in the earth have a stronger root system, and grow taller and faster. Bonsai, on the other hand, grow slow due to their miniature container size. Even a small pruning design mistake can leave a devastating impression on a bonsai tree that could thwart its potential health and beauty for the rest of its life.
Introduction
Especially when pruning evergreen conifers, it is easy to wonder where to begin. Many questions often arise.
- How do you know which branches are living?
- It is okay to cut a needle?
- On a bushy tree, why not use hedge shears?
- When is the right time to prune?
- Why should I not prune the tree top and branch ends?
For this article, I'm not going to answer all of these questions, but I will be showing with my own custom #illustrations how I recently learned how to prune a small tree in our yard.
Before starting, it is wise to attempt to identify the species by looking at the leaves/needles, and they way they grow. Other clues that can help identify the tree are the type of pinecones it has, any flowering pollen growth that forms, type of bark patterns, and color changes and cycles the tree goes through each year during a specific season.
A Japanese conifer, which I believe is called a Sawara Cypress (Chamaecyparis pisifera, False Cypress) is the tree I will be illustrating. It has scale-like needles that grow in long string-like shapes. The branches are very flexible. The needles turn brown and dry out when they become old and weak.
The needles cascade downward as they grow long, like strings of pearls hanging from pom-poms. In Winter the cold temperatures will weaken the green needles and turn them more yellow. Often times needles protected just under the shade of other needles will still display a vibrant emerald green.
Personally, I like to start working on pruning trees and shrubs just before they are coming out dormancy. New buds are visibly forming on the tips of needles, yet the tree is showing signs of weakness such as many yellow old needles, and brown/dead needles underneath. These are good signs that the tree is ready to be cleaned up with light pruning.
First: Remove Dead Needles
Look at the whole tree, not just the outside.
Get inside the tree and look up along the trunk. You'll probably find lots of brown needles just hanging there, blocking the sunlight. Inner branches are being kept in darkness because of these needles. New buds will not form often in this dry, dark interior.
Last Fall, those needles might have been alive, but since then they have finished serving their purpose by creating a warm blanket around the branches of the tree, helping it to ward off snow, ice, and freezing temperatures. By getting the least sunlight, these needles inside the tree usually suffer the most and die back. It's time to take out all of the interior needles, and it has to be done mostly by hand.
Put on your best gloves, long sleeves, and get out a pair of curved hand-pruners. There are lots of curving branches that might get in the way. Split ends on branches can be dangerous and poke an eye. Consider wearing protective googles. Even scaled needles can be very scratchy and cause a rash to form if needles fall into your gloves or sleeves. Make sure you shake them out immediately if they fall on you, and have a good oil or lotion ready to help the skin heal if you get scratches.
It's going to be very tempting to reach for the hand saw or pruners and start cutting off small branches, or bigger branches to help you get some more space. Resist the urge. The goal is to increase sunlight by removing all the dead needles first, as much as possible. New opportunities will soon open up as you begin to reveal the trunk and the limbs connected to it.
Often there is quite a bit of useless dead needles that used to be growing along the trunk. Those needles served their purpose years ago, when the tree was much shorter and did not have any branches at that height. Now that the tree has these brown needles still packed in under the dark nether pits within the crook of these large limbs, they can be safely removed. It really is a beautiful sight to be able to clearly see the wonderful bark textures of the trunk that were previously hidden by the dead needles.
Second: Remove Dead Limbs
Next step is to remove completely dead limbs.
This is almost impossible to do until you remove most of the dead needles first. Now it should be much easier. If you find a naked limb with nothing growing on it, it's dead.
I prefer to work from the bottom of the tree, and work my way up. Remove needles, then remove limbs without needles on that level, and then work my way up to the next set of branches, following the trunk. Expect lots of falling debris doing it this way though. Eye-wear and a hat can really help protect your eyes, face, and hair.
A nicely pruned tree looks like it hasn't been pruned. Any branches that stop in a sudden dead-end will be an eye-sore. All pruning marks are made along the limbs, where they blend in along the bark.
Be sure to remove the limbs cleanly, without leaving any stumps. Use a hand-saw if pruners are too weak to cut through the old wood. Don't be afraid of the thickness of the limbs you are removing. Cut it completely back to the trunk of the tree, or against the side of a living limb. This style of pruning the dead wood is called cleaning the tree.
Watch out though. It's very easy to mistaken a dead branch with a living one! Follow the branch all the way with your hands to the end, to make sure there is nothing green growing on the tips. Branches are extremely flexible, so don't be afraid to really bend them all the way in to check.
Accidents will happen though. I found a couple branches growing near the base of the tree reaching all the way up to the top of the tree. I cut them off because I did not realize they had some green needles still growing on the branch tip after more than three feet of nothing growing on it. These kind of branches were probably weaker than normal lateral branches though, and would have eventually caused some shape problems to the tree. I will write more about ideal design and shapes of trees in a future article.
If in doubt, leave the branch alone! Don't remove any branch completely if there is any green needles on it.
Third: Remove needles from the outside.
This is the final stage for cleaning the tree completely of dead wood and dead needles.
From the outside, separate the green needles growing on the branches by hand, and look for dead needles growing in between. This is a bit of a puzzle, as you want to follow the lines of the green and brown needles along the branch stems.
In Blue: Correct pruning locations where only dead pieces extend from. In Red: Incorrect pruning locations where both dead and living needles are removed.
It gets tricky! You'll have to look closely at the entire branch, piece by piece.
Sometimes needles will turn brown and become woody, and new green needles will grow from it, while leaving behind past growth of brown needles it no longer needs. Don't remove the woody part of the stems, only the discardable needles that have nothing green attached to it. Often times they will snap off cleanly by pinching them back against the grain of the scales.
Thicker needles that turned into branches, with only brown needles growing on them, these will usually need to be removed with pruners. Again, try to make the pruning mark less visible by cutting the entire dead stem off, cleanly where it joins a limb that supports living needles.
Final Results
Without doing any thinning or pruning to the living, green parts of the tree, the work on this tree is finished.
Sunlight can now visibly pass through the interior of the tree. The trunk line and some of the main branches are visible in between the thousands of needles.
This style of pruning will give a tree a great start for spring. This is the time of year to attempt to maximize the tree's ability to rejuvenate itself, so it can grow fresh new material. Sunlight and rain will be easier to penetrate all part of the tree. This will promote health of the trunk, branches, and needles. New growth and buds should appear all over the tree. Any holes and gaps in the tree, where dead parts of the tree were removed, can now be filled in with fresh green growth for the entire Summer season.
Trees love to be given room to grow.
Thank you for reviewing my article. Hope it was entertaining and informative. As always, I'm wishing all my readers the best wishes!
Bonsai!
Saturday, February 23, 2019
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Photos in this post are all #originalworks by 
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