Watering, fertilizing, and topping the ground with an inch of compost after coppicing is a good strategy for helping a plant bounce back from beheading. This lets you enjoy that season’s flowers, but the tradeoff is that the plant has to grow two sets of leaves in one year, which is energy-draining. The other doable time in the case of spring-blooming shrubs is right after they bloom. If you’re going to coppice, the ideal time is end of winter – right before new growth happens. Sometimes the cold will kill all or most of the top growth of borderline-hardy woody plants, such as crape myrtles, figs, vitex, and sometimes butterfly bushes and big-leaf hydrangeas. In cold winters, the weather might force you to coppice. Sweetspires, rose-of-sharons, butterfly bushes, beautybushes, forsythia, and elderberries are other woody plants you can rejuvenate by coppicing if they’re getting too dense, developing leaf disease, or just getting too big. The year after I cut the whole thing almost to the ground and got rid of all of the fallen diseased leaves, I had clean foliage and a more compact habit. I once rejuvenated a gangly ninebark that was getting hammered by powdery mildew. The new growth will be skinnier and shorter, but the bloom probably will be much better the following May. The quicker way to get to that new lilac is by cutting everything to a 3- to 4-inch stub right after bloom. Do this each year, and you’ll have the equivalent of a new shrub every fourth year. Allow an equal number of new shoots to replace the cut ones. Coppice it each March before new growth begins, and you get a 6-foot shrub with nearly white foliage in spring.Īll but the first-year growth of this beautybush has been cut to the ground to rejuvenate the plant.Ī good way to prevent that is by removing one-third of the biggest, oldest shoots to the ground immediately after the plant finishes blooming each May. Let the plant alone, and it gets rangy with green leaves. The variegated-leaf dappled or tricolor willow ( Salix integra ‘Hakuro-nishiki’) is another plant whose leaves look much better on new wood. The tradeoff is that with coppicing, you won’t get any/many of the plant’s rounded, “puffy-smoke-ball” flowers. Let them unpruned, and little by little, new shoots dwindle, and the aging stems turn grayish-brown.įor size control, a good plant to coppice every year or two is the purple smoke bush, which will quickly become a purple smoke tree if you don’t cut it.Ī near decapitation in March will create a 6-foot shrub with vibrant purple-burgundy leaves instead of a 20-footer with duller purple-brown summer leaves and a floppy, gangly habit. These dogwoods produce their brightest red or gold stems on new wood. Several species of these 5- to 6-foot bushy shrubs respond nicely to being cut back to 3- or 4-inch stubs at the end of each winter. Probably the best known coppice-worthy shrubs are the red-twig and gold-twig dogwoods. Some species push up some weak, leggy, half-hearted new shoots after coppicing – enough to keep the plant alive but a far cry from the first-generation effort.īut some woody species – especially ones that grow as multi-stemmed flowering shrubs – will roar back better than ever. Coppice an oak, maple, or most any evergreen, and you’ll find yourself looking at a lifeless stump. Trees that are generally grown as single-trunk plants, for example, don’t respond well to a near total cutback. Saving Earth Britannica Presents Earth’s To-Do List for the 21st Century.The new shoots of red-twig dogwoods are the most colorful, fading to grown and gray once they’re 3 or 4 years old. Its best done in late winter or early spring, just as they start to bud, for several reasons: firstly, by pruning just as the sap is rising, all the energy of the plant will go into making new growth straight away, so that your fresh cuts dont have time to rot, or to allow infection in.Britannica Beyond We’ve created a new place where questions are at the center of learning.100 Women Britannica celebrates the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment, highlighting suffragists and history-making politicians. ![]()
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