Monty Don shares three plants that must be pruned now to ‘bear maximum flowers’
June is a time to relax and enjoy your garden, but some gardening jobs still need doing - Monty Don claims one is pruning.
Pruning is a gardening task that is often required every month, but it’s important to know which specific plants need pruning.
This task involves removing the dead, diseased, and injured parts of a plant to maximise their vigour and aesthetic qualities.
Unlike in May when just one plant was recommended to prune, Monty Don has shared three types of plants in his blog that will benefit from a prune this month.
Plants to prune in June
1. Wisteria
One of the first plants to prune this month is wisteria. Wisteria produces its flowers on new growth, which in turn emerges from spurs off the main shoots.
When they have finished flowering - for most of that is around the middle of June - it is “the best time to prune” all this year’s new shoots back to a spur “leaving no more than about six inches of growth”.
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During the process, the whole plant can be tidied, trained and tied in so that there are no loose, trailing shoots.
If there is any doubt about how hard to prune, the 68-year-old recommends gardeners “err on the side of cutting too lightly” and then in the new year, when the foliage has all died back, they can prune again, reducing each side shoot to just two or three inches.
2. Early flowering shrubs
The spring flowering shrubs such as Philadelphus, Amelanchier, deutzia, weigela and Rubus all produce their flowers on shoots grown the previous summer so they “should be pruned now”.
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Monty explained: “This will give the new growth plenty of time to ripen before winter and thus bear maximum flowers next spring.”
Mature shrubs should be pruned hard, cutting back most of the flowering stems to a healthy new shoot and taking the oldest growth (but no more than a third or quarter of the plant) right back to the base so it is completely renewed every three or four years.
A very overgrown shrub should be renewed in this gradual manner too. Young shrubs should have the weakest growth cut back with the remainder pruned to shape and size.
Once pruning is carried out, the expert advised gardeners to “weed, water and mulch with compost” and take semi-ripe cuttings from healthy, straight non-flowering pruned stems.
3. Apples pears and dessert grapes
If your apple or pear trees suddenly deposit hundreds of small fruits on the ground you might feel something is going wrong, but this is perfectly normal and known as the “June drop”.
The tree is just reducing the quantity of fruit it carries to successfully ripen those that remain. However, it is “indiscriminate” about which fruit it lets go, so it is a good idea to “selectively remove the smallest fruit at this time of year before the tree does it for you”.
Monty instructed: “Reduce each cluster on a spur to just two fruits that are not touching each other.
“Not only will these grow and ripen better as a result but also the risk of damaging the branches by the weight of the fruit later in the year is greatly reduced.”
