Hard Pruning a 60 Year Old Rose of Sharon to See the House

We’ve got Ann from Canton, “I have some Roses of Sharon growing on the east side of my house. They’re about 60 years old. They’re a whole bank of them. They’re very tall, and I’m wondering if I should trim them now or in the spring, because in the spring I want to have that side painted, and they’re up there where the wood is.”

So if you’re going to get really aggressive with these plants, which from the sounds of it is what’s going to happen, you’re going to take off a significant amount of the plant.

When you trim it back, you’re going to get a large reflush of growth. Now, you would never want to prune that plant like this time of year in the middle of a drought. It would really stress that plant out, and you would get a bunch of stem die back, and it just wouldn’t be ideal to get that plant to recover really well.

 I would probably wait until late March to do that. It’s not going to be warm enough at that point to really paint or reseal a house yet anyways, and that would be the best time to get aggressive with the Roses of Sharon plant. Then they can get in there, do their painting, and then as that plant starts to flush its leaves, then you can put some fertilizer on it, like an all-season slow-release. We sell it at the nursery. It lasts for six months.

It’ll help the plant recover from that hard pruning that you’re going to do in the springtime. That’s one of the plants that does recover well from being pruned. If we were to have a spring where we didn’t get a lot of rain, it would still be a good idea to make sure it has all the ingredients it needs to recover from that hard pruning, moisture, fertilizer, sunlight. 

Normally in the spring we have plenty of rain, just like this year where we had an ample amount of rain. If we would have a spring that for some reason was dry, that would be the only thing that you would have to do other than putting the fertilizer on it, and it should recover quite well.

A lot of times, too, it’s going to look better. A lot of people are afraid to trim sometimes, and I always tell people, don’t fear the pruners. I mean trimming out dead any time of year is a good thing to do. Any dead, any crossing branches. Doing it in the springtime, there’s no foliage on the plant. That really helps you see the stem structure. 

And wherever you trim it back to, kind of imagining a foot of growth coming back on that plant, especially, like she said, those were 60 years old. You’ve got a massive root system to feed the top of that plant.

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