Can you trim evergreen bushes in the summer

Evergreens are some of the hardest-working living elements in your landscape. They produce foliage year-round, and in the depth of winter, they bring color and texture to front entries and garden beds, when most deciduous plants are bare. Caring for evergreen trees and shrubs includes occasional pruning to keep them healthy and looking their best. In some cases, you also might need to tame rapid growth that's crowding walkways or other plants. Pruning evergreens is a little different than trimming other trees and shrubs. This simple guide will walk you through the basics of pruning so you can enjoy decades of year-round color from these beautiful plants.

Tips for Trimming Evergreens

Besides trees or shrubs with dead or damaged areas, overgrown and fast-growing evergreens are the prime candidates for pruning. Your main goal is to preserve the natural shape of the plant as much as possible (unless you're creating a sculpted hedge or topiary, of course). So trade your hedge trimmers for a sturdy pair of pruning shears or loppers so you can carefully cut away individual branches. Selectively remove each branch back to the main branch it may be growing from, or to the trunk itself. For shrubs, you may need to cut a branch back to ground level. Annual pruning to maintain an evergreen's size is easier on the plant—and you—than tackling big pruning projects every few years.

How to Trim Overgrown Evergreen Trees

Evergreen trees that are pushing the limits on their planting space are tricky to rein in while maintaining the natural shape of the plant. In many cases, evergreen trees do not produce new growth on old portions of a branch. For example, new growth on a white pine forms exclusively at the tips of the branches. Cutting a branch back by half its length will simply result in a dead branch stub. Often the only tactic for reducing the size of an evergreen tree is to cut the lower branches all the way back to the trunk.

How to Cut Back Overgrown Evergreen Shrubs

Unlike overgrown evergreen trees, shrubs usually can handle more intense pruning to reduce their size. Still, it's best to trim back an overgrown shrub by pruning one branch at a time, rather than shearing the plant. This will make it much easier to maintain the shrub's natural shape. And remember, many evergreens do not produce new growth on old portions of a branch, so shearing certain evergreens can leave an ugly, brown mess that takes a long time to grow out.

Maintaining Evergreen Hedges

Yearly pruning is key to maintaining a hedge. Some fast-growing evergreens might demand an early spring pruning and a midsummer trim to keep them in bounds and tidy. Boxwood, juniper, yew, and holly are common evergreen hedge plants. A sharp pair of shears will do the job, but powered hedge trimmers make for faster work. Just be careful not to cut the hedges back to the dead zone (the inner area where there's no foliage). Some species will push out new buds when cut back to bare branches, but others won't fill in again. Stick to only sheering the outermost couple of inches of foliage.

The Best Time to Prune Evergreens

Late winter or early spring is the best time to prune most evergreens. Pruning in spring allows the cuts to heal quickly and new buds to develop. Flowering evergreens, such as rhododendrons and camellias, are an exception. To maximize flower buds for the following year, prune flowering evergreens right after they bloom. One surefire tip: don't prune evergreens in late summer or fall. Pruning late in the growing season leaves plants susceptible to winter damage.

The calendar isn't a factor when cutting out dead, broken, or diseased evergreen foliage. Remove the offending branches as soon as you notice them, cutting back to healthy, live growth or to the main stem. Aim to make cuts that leave the plant with the most natural shape possible. This often means cutting the branch back to the trunk or to ground level for a shrub.

Determining whether you should prune bushes in the summer depends on what kind they are, how healthy they are, and if they are getting so unwieldy that they whack you in the face as you walk up your front path. Hedges and other bushes that need to be kept in a distinct shape for privacy or because you've lovingly shaped it to look like a giant bunny, need to be pruned throughout the summer to stay manicured. The best time to trim evergreen bushes, whether they are part of informal hedges or specimen plantings, may include pruning in summer if their health is at stake, but otherwise need to be pruned based on when they flower.

Damaged Wood

If you note damage to your bushes, from weather, animals or due to disease, prune those branches immediately, even if the bush should not optimally be pruned in the summer. Dead or dying wood can be an entry point for disease or insects to damage the rest of the bush.

Dip the blades of pruning shears into Lysol or Pine-Sol between cuts to ensure that disease does not spread from one branch to another on the shears. Avoid using chlorine bleach solutions; the bleach corrodes the metal blades of your tools.

Spring-flowering Bushes

Determining when the bush flowers is part of a successful pruning strategy. Some bushes, such as the forsythia (Forsythia spp.), grown in U.S. Department of Agriculture plant hardiness zones 5 through 9, bloom early in the spring, flowering on buds that formed the previous summer.

To avoid removing the buds that will flower the following year, prune these early-flowering shrubs as soon as flowers fade, which may be in early summer. Pruning in the mid- to late-summer negatively affects the flowers the following spring. These shrubs also need to be pruned early in the summer so they have time to heal and to develop new growth that will mature before the cold weather hits.

Summer-flowering Bushes

Bushes that flower in the summer bloom on growth from the current growing season. These bushes should not be pruned in the summer before blooming, as this would remove the buds that are about to bloom. Prune these shrubs before new growth begins in the spring, either when they are dormant in winter or in early spring.

A butterfly bush (Buddleja davidii), grown in USDA zones 6 through 9, and rose of Sharon (Hibiscus syriacus), grown in USDA zones 5 through 8, are examples of these summer-flowering shrubs. You can prune these bushes after flowering to improve their shape if you need to; you won't be removing buds they need for the next growing season, but summer pruning of these shrubs will still decrease foliage growth.

Best Time to Trim Hedges

Pruning hedges needs to be a consistent process to make sure that the hedges fill in; if they grow too fast without pruning, they will be long and leggy. This requires summer pruning.

The best time to prune boxwoods that have been sheared into formal hedges is in the spring after new growth begins, then throughout the spring and summer growing season to keep the hedges filling in and to maintain the manicured look. Be sure to prune before the hedge grows 6 to 8 inches from the last pruning.

Informal hedges that do not need to maintain a careful shape should be pruned when the hedge is dormant, then again mid-summer. Allow the informal hedge to maintain its natural shape.