I went to a neighborhood clean-up a few weeks ago and set to work cleaning up the yard of my 96 year-old neighbor. It was actually quite a pretty yard–she still goes out and gardens, although lately the weeds have gotten away from her. I set to work weeding and cutting back perennials and doing other fall task. Then I started freaking out because people were pruning horribly wrong.

There’s some basic pruning rules that were being ignored. I’m not going to try to overly explain them here, but they include cutting back to a bud or branch angle. This is apparently not common knowledge, but it should be. It is included in about every book or instruction on pruning, but maybe it also needs to be attached to every set of loppers sold at the store.  I went over and tried to show people how to do this a bit, and also cleaned up some cuts.

But the main mistake was that people were pruning in the fall. In our climate, fall is simply not a good time to prune. With winter coming, a fall pruning can make a lot of shrubs and trees less able to deal with the pending cold. Don’t add it to the list of fall clean-up tasks. The only pruning I would do is very gentle pruning of things like shrubs that are attacking all people who attempt to greet your front door. Mostly, just let it wait until later winter to early spring, or whenever is appropriate for the shrub. (That might require a bit of research. It’s better than killing or mutilating your plant.)

This is a lilac. I attempted to clean it up a bit, but it’s horrid. A shrub should never look like this and especially not in the fall. A good pruning right after it blooms should help it out more, but for now the damage is done.