This is a great time of year to shape up your plants, as stated in previous posts. We get asked how to prune all kinds of things. Today’s question is how would you prune a magnolia tree?

The first thing we do is take off any of the dead branches. If there’s any dead material in the plant, we take that off first. Then step back, take a look at the plant, then go inside the plant again and look for branches that are crossing. For instance, if you have a branch on the left side and it’s growing back through the center of the plant and coming out the right side, those crossing branches are the next thing we take off. We never want to take off more than one third of the live part of the plant. 20 percent is the maximum we want to take off to keep the stress level as low as possible.

When you get all of the dead matter out and the crossing branches out, then you can step back and do some light pruning to actually shape the plant up the way you want it to be. Now for a magnolia tree, by now it has those buds on it that are going to be the flowers. If you trim them, just like rhododendrons and azaleas, those buds are already set. You’d be cutting the flower buds off for this year. Now, with that being said, if you want to get really aggressive and prune a plant, you can still do it, but you are going to sacrifice the flowering for that first season when you do that hard pruning.

The other window of opportunity is as soon as it’s done blooming, as you’ll see with the magnolias, those flowers will open up and they’ll be beautiful. When the time comes and the flower is starting to fade, all the leaves will start to come on really quickly. You have a very short window of time there. As soon as it’s done blooming, then you want to get in there while you can still see the stem structure of the plant before the leaves come all the way out. Then you want to do that trimming in that window, if you missed the first one.

Our nursery staff are always willing to answer any question or help with any problem you might have. Stop into our Everhard location or our Portage location today.