Article content Pruning garden plants in summer is perhaps more important than the traditional dormant season trimming in winter. Pruning on cooler days will minimize the stress on your plants and prevent inside leaf burn. At this time of the year, vines, in particular, need extra attention because they tend to overgrow.
We love vines for the privacy and the unique accents they provide, but they often don’t know when to quit. Summer-flowering vines, like clematis, honeysuckles, trumpet vines (campsis) and wisterias, should all be encouraged to develop new stems for future flowering, but they can quickly overtake their allotted space. Most of us are a too conservative in our pruning techniques.
We should recognize not only the importance of retaining the flowering stems but also the need to prune all the other branches back hard as they will quickly start to regrow. Wisterias, especially the repeat-flowering varieties, like Blue Moon need to have thicker, woody vines for the production of flowers, but we can say goodbye to most of the new growth they produce. It’s a balance of developing future flowering stems while keeping much of the vigorous growth in check.
Early flowering clematis, like the alpinas, the macropetalas and the montanas, need older, mature growth to develop their spring buds, but here too, only so much is needed. Don’t be gentle with non-flowering vines, particularly Virginia creeper and Algerian ivy. If you are too timid, they’ll quickly stampede bey.