Cut early with clippers,
better than bigger cuts later with a saw
If you need a saw to prune a tree, you waited too long. Clippers
are always better than a saw.
- Mike Loncar -
We may never be able to point to 70 year old proof, as our
mentor Mike Loncar could, but we can already see the truth of this
advice as our own planting and pruning work reaches the 20- and 30
year mark.
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(See Train Young Trees for our
step-by-step demonstration of pruning a tree when it's small. We
envision it large to decide what to cut, but we don't wait for it
to get big.)
In the case we present here, a small flowering dogwood in our
care (Cornus florida 'Cherokee Sunset') had been dying
back. Each year some branches died and we removed them. We noted
that the deadwood was mostly associated with a trunk that had been
damaged at some time when the tree was small.
Below: See the bare limbs? That dead wood stems from a trunk
with an old wound. (Arrows)
After three years of removing dead limbs we concluded that the
damaged trunk had to go. "Too bad the grower didn't take it out
back when," we said, of the old wound. Then we gritted our teeth
and sawed.
Right: A big cut to remove the damaged trunk. As we sawed,
we imagined out we'd see the gap until sprouts that had appeared
from below the wounded area grew to fill in.
Above: When we removed the trunk (arrow) we were pleasantly
surprised.
So nice to feel that our work might have been approved by two
ladies we respect:
If you can see that it was pruned, you did something
wrong.
- Grandmother to our mentor Virginia
Smith, teaching in the 1920's -
The best pruning is invisible. If what you cut out are bad
branches, no one misses them.
- Virginia Holman -
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