Talking Trees with Davey Tree

Pruning After Flowering

May 05, 2022 The Davey Tree Expert Company Season 2 Episode 17
Talking Trees with Davey Tree
Pruning After Flowering
Show Notes Transcript

Tim Jackson from Davey's West San Antonio office talks about how to correctly prune flowering trees, as well as how he first learned how to prune and his favorite trees in Texas.

In this episode we cover:

  • Winter in Texas (0:50)
  • Pruning flowering trees (1:16) 
  • Educating clients (2:24)
  • Lateral limbs (4:13)
  • How Tim learned how to prune trees (4:59)
  • Pruning apples trees (5:42)
  • Artistic side of pruning (6:38) (15:19)
  • Pruning weeping trees (7:47)
  • Having an arborist prune your trees (8:35)
  • Trees that Tim loves (9:36)
  • Why Tim enjoys being an arborist (10:38) (16:30)
  • Spring so far in Texas (12:05)
  • Drought (12:40)
  • Fertilization (13:46)

To find your local Davey office, check out our find a local office page to search by zip code.

To learn more about the benefits of pruning, read our blog, What is Pruning? The Importance, Benefits an Methods of Pruning.
To learn more about the correct time to prune trees, read our blog, Pruning Trees in Spring - is it OK to Do?
To learn more about pruning fruit trees, read our blog, Should I Be Pruning Fruit Trees in Summer?

Connect with Davey Tree on social media:
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Facebook: @DaveyTree
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YouTube: The Davey Tree Expert Company
LinkedIn: The Davey Tree Expert Company

Have topics you'd like us to cover on the podcast? Email us at podcasts@davey.com. We want to hear from you!

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Doug Oster: Welcome to the Davey Tree Expert Company's podcast Talking Trees. I'm your host Doug Oster. Each week, our expert arborists share advice on seasonal tree care, how to make your trees thrive, arborists' favorite trees, and much more. Tune in every Thursday to learn more because here at the Talking Trees podcast, we know trees are the answer. I'm joined this week by Tim Jackson, he's a district manager for the Davey Tree Expert Company in West San Antonio, Texas and today we're talking all about pruning trees that are spring flowering. How are you doing today Tim?

Tim Jackson: Very well how are you doing?

Doug: I'm doing great I want you to school me on the right time to prune things that flower now up here but I want to start off with and tell me a little bit about what's the winter like in San Antonio, Texas?

Tim: Right now it's a muggy 73 degrees and cloudy but we sometimes freeze here. It's rare but we get the occasional freeze but it's been a very tolerable winter so far.

Doug: Sounds much more tolerable than the Pittsburgh winter for sure.

Tim: No doubt about that.

Doug: A lot of times when we talk about pruning or when I talk about pruning with arborists, a lot of it is done off-season when they're dormant but I guess in my case when I'm thinking up in the east for a dogwood if I prune that with the buds on, then I'll be pruning off the flowers.

Tim: That's right. Dogwoods, redbuds, some of these plants that grow up there are typically setting their buds on the older growth and when they're spring bloomers, you should prune them during the summer or fall, sometime after their bloom in the spring is the time you want to start pruning those.

Doug: What are some general rules for spring flowering trees when we talk about pruning?

Tim: A general rule is try not to take too much of the plant back. We always consider the shape, the species, and the environment. Sometimes you have to get a plant to fit into a certain spot, they become leggy and a lot of shade in some cases and you need to bring them back some in order to manage their weight but as far as their flowering, the best time to prune them is after the bloom.

Doug: I was at a property yesterday and I could not convince this guy to stop butchering his forsythia shrubs and I'm talking butchering. Talk a little bit about educating your clients on pruning the right way.

Tim: If there's a general right way, you'd rather not just hack them back to nubs and let them restart. Now, you could call that loosely rejuvenation pruning. A lot of times you'll have a plant that just really overgrows its space so they cut them back really hard but that shouldn't be an annual event on most plants and forsythia notwithstanding.

Doug: The thing is that he was just telling me, he goes, "I want it to look good for my neighbors and they're just getting too big." I'm like, "You've got this plant out in the middle of nowhere, you're ruining its complete shape, its natural shape," but again the homeowner has it in his mind that this is the way a forsythia is supposed to look. A forsythia is a weed but still, cutting it back like that, taking off half the plant, it can't be good for its overall health down the road.

Tim: The long-term effects of the overpruning if we'll call it that is it's just that they tend to sprout more from the ground, they're trying to rejuvenate. Really, you're heading back a plant over and over again causing it to expend all kinds of energies to try and grow back to what it's been cut to incorrectly. It's always better to cut back to lateral limbs if at all possible. Even on smaller things, the less woody plants cut them back to laterals anyway. Take less than 25% at a time and you should be safe.

Doug: That's what I was trying to show him but can you explain what we mean we mean lateral limbs instead of-- again, every shrub that he touched, he was he was just basically cutting the tips off which is the worst thing you can do. Just talk a little bit about going back to where that cut should be made.

Tim: Tip pruning is often done and it's a bit of a wives' tale, I've heard it for years and if you cut the tips off, they'll bloom more. In fact they won't in most cases. They'll bloom just as much with or without tip pruning but to cut to a lateral correctly, you want to go back to a twig or a branch that is at least half the size of the parent stem.

Doug: How did you learn how to do the pruning right?

Tim: I guess I grew up right behind an apple orchard in Ohio and I guess I spent a lot of time bothering the neighbor. While I was watching, he offered me a job so when I was young, I started pruning apple trees and other trees, and that led to pruning his shrubs and other things and I learned a lot there. I lived next door to a now-deceased guy named Vern Thaxton who worked for Davey Tree many years ago. He taught me a lot of things about gardening even when I was very young, and I guess whatever my grandmother told me because everything she planted in the ground turned green and bloomed and there was no rhyme or reason to it. She just had that green thumb.

Doug: Tell me about pruning apple trees. That seems like serious pruning to me because if you don't do it right, you're not going to get the apples where you want them, is that right?

Tim: That is right. Now, fruit-bearing trees-- every tree flowers in one way or another. Most of them aren't very showy. Oak trees aren't very showy but they make an awful lot of flowers. If you're pruning a fruit tree, in particular an apple, it depends on what you want the tree to do because there's orchard pruning and then there's pruning for shape, pruning for weight. When a tree gets so heavy on the ends, you just have to head them back. You want to do that after fruiting. Not after flowering but after pruning.

Doug: Tell me a little bit about that experience growing up with that orchard right next door to you. That sounds pretty cool.

Tim: I ate a lot of apples, I can tell you that. A lot of pears, a lot of apples. It was a good place to grow up, that's for sure.

Doug: Let's talk a little bit more about pruning as science and art. That's how I always phrase it. Not every arborist likes me to say it that way. That's how I look at it. There are certain rules about pruning but what about the artistic part of it? What about making sure the plant looks the way you want it to look?

Tim: Obviously, I work primarily for homeowners and they've got a limited yard space. You've got a shape of a plant that you want to maintain and manage in a certain space. You want the bloom to occur above eight feet off the ground. If it's near a walkway, you want it not to grow into the house so you've got some simple heading back things to keep it off of structures but I really look back at it and think, "What's the best plan for curb appeal and how big could this plant get and what could we cut it back to, to intelligently and artfully make this thing look right?"

Most people want them round so we get some long ends here and there and make some light shaping cuts back to laterals so we can make the plant fit the space and look the way they want it to.

Doug: One thing I don't know anything about at all is what to do with weeping trees. I guess weeping cherry is one of them where part of it doesn't weep anymore. What do you do in those situations?

Tim: That's a good question. Weeping cherries, like many weeping plants, are usually grafted species. What they do is they graft onto a different cherry which is not weeping and then the rest of the stock that grows above ground is a weeping variety. Often what will happen is a ground shoot will come up from the base non-weeping because it's coming from the rootstock so that will go straight up and start to get into the canopy of the weeping tree. The best thing to do there is cut back the rootstock and make sure just the weeping part of the tree is left.

Doug: How important is it for a homeowner to get a certified arborist to come out and do the pruning as opposed to them doing it themselves?

Tim: Unless they've read a lot and studied a lot, it's better just to hire someone who's got that credential, somebody who just has done this a lot, has a lot of experience with a lot of plants, and can make better decisions.

Doug: Any horror stories about going onto the site and seeing what a homeowner has done to their tree? Like the horror story I saw yesterday with those poor forsythias?

Tim: More than I could tell in the length of time we probably have but people go out and they start cutting. Often the husband will do some cutting on a weekend and the wife will call me during the week and say, "Would you come and fix what my husband did?" That's the typical. It happens often enough or they'll treat a flowering tree the same as they might an oak tree or something. They're really completely different species that just require different attention.

Doug: Down in Texas, tell me about some of your favorite trees, trees that an arborist would love that maybe a homeowner might not see as often or plant as often.

Tim: I think the trees that most of us love are probably the same trees others do. In South Texas, we have live oak trees. It's my favorite tree, they're fairly ubiquitous here. They just are long, wide-spreading interesting trunks. Really, the great thing about them is they have this wonderful growth habit that makes an umbrella, but beneath them, I really like to see the appropriate plantings of Japanese maples, which can grow even in Canada. Redbud trees are wonderful for that because they grow better in an understory environment. If they're in direct sun, they don't do as well.

Really, you get a layered effect. You get this wonderful overarching umbrella of an oak tree, and beneath it, you can plant these wonderful ornamentals that can give you some color and some bloom, and a little bit of change of texture.

Doug: We've heard about just your early life of already starting with trees. Why was it right for you to continue into your career and become an arborist?

Tim: Honestly, I think it was more about the climbing aspect of it. I really always have climbed things, and I enjoyed getting way up into trees. When you finish pruning a tree and you look back at it, you get to look at that tree and say, "I just took care of that thing, and it's going to be here for another 100 years." You leave these wonderful landmarks and you do them some good. You give them some valued service, you take care of them, you improve their condition.

Doug: Talk about the time with the clients, about helping them solve these problems.

Tim: I guess almost like an evolution. For me, I was really good at climbing trees when the opportunity came to move up to where I was more intently servicing clients and giving advice more than I was doing pruning. That transition ended up to be more fulfilling than climbing the trees themselves, which was hard for me to understand at the time, but really working with people, their love for trees, having a shared idea going forward when we present them with, "Hey, this is what you've got and this is where you want it to be, this is how we'll do it." Going through that with each and every client and getting to know them has been very rewarding.

Doug: How has the start of the season for you been down in Texas as far as the weather?

Tim: Very little rain. Drought kicked off, I guess late of 2021, and very little rain to speak of. Not much good for anything but a little bit of the lawns. Supplemental watering became a big topic for clients. They would say, "Why is this tree not as good as it was last year at this time?" We need water and the trees are asking for it. Fertilization also, they just really need some deep root fertilization.

Doug: Let's talk a little bit about that because first off, anybody who grows anything, when you hear the word drought, that's just the worst thing that can happen. I don't care if you're growing tomatoes or trees. A drought is not a good thing, but when you have to water a tomato, it's much different than watering a big tree. Talk a little bit about that, about how much water that tree needs.

Tim: Obviously, tomatoes and smaller plants, you can water very near to the trunks of them, and they will get that throughout the root zone. Larger trees, you have to water further out. Nearer to the drip line of the tree. Somewhere between five feet from the edge of the drip line and five feet outside is where most of the really good feeder roots are. That's where most of the water uptake occurs, not at the trunk. I guess I would advise again, do not water the trunk of your tree, water where the roots are.

Doug: I guess you really got to soak it in, right?

Tim: It's much deeper with a larger tree. Depending on your soil profile, you may have roots in the upper 28 inches. In parts of South Texas, it might be the upper six inches.

Doug: Then talk about fertilization. This is something that I talk about with arborists all the time, but I think it's something that homeowners don't think about a lot, but it's an important part of growing trees.

Tim: I guess I could liken it to taking a multivitamin or something. We all have little parts of our diet that are not completely fulfilled. You can certainly use up the iron that's available in an area, or the uptake might be slowed because the alkalinity is high. There are a number of reasons why you should add supplemental iron. Nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, all at a slow release rate are the best way to deliver it, and some other micronutrients.

Really commonly on magnolia trees, they need manganese as well as iron. It looks like an iron deficiency or a sclerosis, but on that particular species, it's nearly always manganese. If you find that you have a plant that's yellowing, red oaks do this very commonly up north. If you see them as a neon yellow when they ought to be green and you can see a green vein, they're iron-poor and they're screaming for iron, so fertilization with iron added is always a good thing.

Doug: Talk a little bit about how you do that. How do you fertilize a big giant tree like that?

Tim: The homeowner remedies aren't as good or as, I guess, elegant as what we've developed over the years here at Davey is we use a soil probe, push it into the ground, and deliver it with water subsurface. We're getting it directly to the roots and we're covering the entire root zone of the tree.

Doug: Talk a little bit about the importance of taking your time pruning. As you said, when you're done looking back at that tree and seeing its overall shape, how important that is, not just going in there and hacking wildly.

Tim: If you were to take a tree, for example, that was like a big lollipop and you took a pair of head shears to it, you could probably finish the tree much more quickly, but you would have dozens of incorrect cuts, and just a few correct ones all throughout the tree. Hundreds of wrong cuts and just a few correct cuts is not the best way to do it. If you can get the proper tools, the proper pole pruner, or hand snips if needed, it's important to cut back to those laterals as we've spoke about earlier, but as importantly, it's the direction those laterals you're cutting to are making in the tree.

You have to look at the plant and think, "Okay, this lateral grows to the center. It's got space there. Let me cut to this one," so you have choices. When you do that, you can shape and direct a tree a lot more effectively.

Doug: I just want to send this message out to homeowners, do yourself a favor. If you love your trees, have an expert come out and do your pruning for you. It's so important. I'm going to finish up, Tim, with one more question. Just tell me what's the best part about your job in general?

Tim: Honestly, it's people. It just is that way. I do love trees. I love what I do, but it's the people I work for that really just bring me fulfillment.

Doug: I'm going to leave it right there. That's good stuff. Thanks for your time and thanks for all that great information. Have a great day, Tim.

Tim: Thank you.

Doug: That was some great pruning information for sure. Now, next week, we have a special show all about migrating birds and how they relate to trees. You don't want to miss it. Tune in every Thursday to the Talking Trees podcast from the Davey Tree Expert Company. I'm your host, Doug Oster. I'd love it if you would subscribe to the podcast. Where else can you have this kind of fun? As always, we'd like to remind you on the Talking Trees podcast, trees are the answer.

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