Dramatically Cutting Back an Overgrown Lilac Bush, When?

We have Cheryl in Canton. ‘Hi, guys. Good morning. I have a boomerang lilac bush that has gotten humongous and is overgrowing my porch. When can I do a dramatic cut down on this?’

Okay, that’s a great question. Now, when we do a dramatic cut down on that plant, we unfortunately are going to lose the blooms for that season. A lot of people will tell you to wait until right when it’s done blooming, but a lot of times with a boomerang lilac, your leaves have already started to come out.

And so the problem with waiting to do it right when they’re done blooming, like minor pruning, I would definitely say as soon as it’s done blooming, shape that plant up a little bit, you’re good to go. But with a major cutback like what you’re talking about, I’m willing to sacrifice the blooms for one season for the overall survivability of the plant. So we’re going to treat that just like we treat a burning bush that we’re getting real heavy aggressive on the trim back.

And we’re going to do that probably sometime around the middle of April. We want to do, we want to beginning middle of April, once the brunt of winter’s over, that’s when we’re going to get really aggressive with it. And also equally as important, you want to use that Rohr’s all season fertilizer. It’s going to feed it for six months. If it’s an older plant like that, you can use five to seven scoops of that and just like scratch it into the mulch. So it makes good soil contact.

Generally in the spring, we don’t have to water anything because mother nature is usually doing that for us. If we happen to be dry, then you would want to water that fertilizer to activate it.

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