Rake, Prune, Clean And Cultivate Before Spring Growth

Until now, fallen leaves and other winter debris have been protecting your plants. Now it's time to clean up before new growth begins.

Break Out the Rake

Between now and the first week of March, grab your leaf rake. If you do it now, you can clean up around dianthus, hostas, daylilies, daffodils, tulips and other perennials without damaging them. Even now, you should be careful not to tear flowers and foliage when raking around the snowdrops, winter aconites and hellebores that are already blooming.

Remove accumulations of leaves around plants, but don't blow the beds bare. Leave behind any fine-textured, crumbling foliage that slips through the tines of your leaf rake. With a little moisture, those leaves decompose quickly and nourish most plants.

Ornamental plants that are prone to disease, such as roses, peonies and boxwoods, and any other plants that have had disease problems, should be blown clear of leaf particles over the roots. Fungal spores on last year's foliage can spread disease this growing season.

Prune to Renew

After cleaning the beds, assess which woody broadleaf evergreens need to be rejuvenated. Renewal pruning of broadleaf evergreens is best done now. Hard pruning is necessary only if a plant has overgrown its boundaries and is losing ornamental value.

Many hollies and azaleas can be pruned drastically; rhododendrons and boxwoods, less so. To reduce the size of these plants and turn them back into small shrubs, hard cut at the end of this month.

Cutting back a holly to stubs is often called "hat-racking." If the holly has a pyramidal habit, you can renew it by topping the trunk and pruning the side branches back to bare sticks while maintaining the plant's shape. Prune selectively, cutting one branch at a time, shaping the holly into a tree or shrub form. The American or Chinese holly, while slower growing, will be covered with new foliage within one year.

Hollies and azaleas grow new leaves by forming adventitious buds under the bark as growth begins in spring. They also renew with new shoots from their roots.

Sometimes azaleas are cut back to a few inches tall and expected to regrow completely from their roots. This has been quite successful for me, but you can lose an azalea using this method. If you have the philosophy that if you lose the plant, it was meant to happen, it is an expedient way to deal with an overgrown azalea. Most grow back quite well.

Renewing boxwood and rhododendrons takes patience. Reduce foliage by a maximum of one-third annually over a period of three years. Retaining two-thirds of the greenery for the following year gives the shrubs the opportunity to renew slowly and develop new foliage and flowers throughout the inside of the plant.

Greenery that is removed with hand pruners must be healthy. Do not prune wilted or dead sections of rhododendron or boxwood and then prune healthy wood without sterilizing the blade with bleach. Bleach is corrosive, so the pruner should then be lubricated with a little light oil, such as WD-40.

Cut the longest stems to reduce the size of plants. Prune back to a leaf, leaf bud or branching stem, or cut all the way to the base. In the case of boxwood, make "holes" throughout the entire shrub to allow in light and promote air circulation, encouraging growth on the inside stems. Rhododendron should be pruned to a lower branch or whorl of leaves, maintaining a natural-looking habit. When foliage regenerates, plants will look fresher and fuller. Renewal is slower from a hard pruning. Leave as much lower foliage as possible.