Viburnum

We’ve got a question here: “I’ve got viburnum that I’ve kind of let go for a while for one reason or another. And they’re pretty big. And I hear they’re hard to cut back.”

Viburnum are actually pretty forgiving of cutting back most of the time. Ideally you want to do it before the foliage comes out. I do know on our viburnum here that we are getting leaves already on them. So I would say that you want to be cautious on how much you trim off right now because it’s already spent energy sending the leaves up to the top.

Now you can trim it a little bit this year, but next year if you want to trim it more, I would do that probably early April before the foliage comes on and then fertilize it with the all season fertilizer real heavy. It should do what’s called back budding down inside the plant. Flush a lot of growth down off the older wood down inside the plant and fill right back. Viburnum are generally pretty tough plants and do take well to a hard pruning, but just not right now.

You could do a little pruning on it now. The leaves aren’t all the way out generally on them. And the way I would do it is I wouldn’t shear it with a head shear. I would selectively take this branch down about a foot or two, leave this one up a little higher, take the next one down. What you’re doing is you’re allowing light back into the core of the plant, which will encourage more growth down inside so that when you do cut it back next year, you already have some physical starts of growth down on the inside.

I know the flowers are beautiful and the fragrance is something else. Talking about a really hard prune, sometimes you do sacrifice a little bit of the flowering that season where you do that hard prune. You can also do it right when it’s done flowering. The way viburnum work is their leaves come partway out, then they flower, and then the leaves fully form the rest of the way. And they are blooming right now. So you could do a light pruning here at the end of the bloom cycle.

And there’s about 150 species of viburnum and there’s only about seven or eight of them that are fragrant. But they are my favorite smell of all of the flowering stuff we sell. One of the most fragrant is the Korean spice. I think it smells like vanilla and hot apple cider. It’s beautiful. I have it in my kitchen window in the summertime. When they’re in flower, I have the windows open and the whole house smells good.

If you’re interested in purchasing one of your own, we have them at our nurseries, or you can buy it here online and have it shipped to you!

Questions? Email us at [email protected] or call one of our two locations: Portage (330-499-0101) or Everhard (330-492-1243).