Josh meets an expert to gain tips on pruning natives and keep them performing at their best. Subscribe 🔔 ab.co/GA-subscribe
Many gardeners think natives are the least likely to need pruning, because plants do just fine in the wild without intervention, right? Plants in gardens are under cultivation and so pruning is not just about maintaining plant health. Josh speaks with an expert to de-mystify pruning native plants.
Chelsea Payne is the curator for arboriculture at Kings Park Botanic Garden in Perth and says, “we prune for health, we prune for beauty, and we prune for risk.” Chelsea says the tools they use “are our basic bread and butter” which include a pair of clean, sharpened secateurs, a small handsaw, and personal protective equipment. For handsaws, Chelsea recommends “buying the best quality that you can. The more cutting edges on the blades will mean that you have more accurate cuts, you don't have to put as much pressure in, and you've got a lot less chance of tearing.” Basic protection items include gloves, safety glasses and methylated spirits, “so at the end of our pruning we can spray down all of our tools and make sure we're not transferring any disease between our plants,” says Chelsea.
Fine pruning is used to maintain clearance on paths, to remove dead, diseased or damaged wood, or to enhance its natural form. To remove a branch, "cut nice and close to a node,” says Chelsea, “use the secateurs to reach in and one nice clean snip, close to that union.” Chelsea also suggests, “stepping back, thinking about how you want to balance the shrub... You can always take more off, you can't put it back on.” Chelsea says plants are “incredibly resilient,” so for home gardeners growing waxflowers, "you can quite easily reduce them by about a third without the plant really even skipping a beat,” says Chelsea. Always finish your job by spraying tools with methylated spirits before moving to the next plant. The Marri or Corymbia calophylla is a large tree endemic to the Swan Coastal Plains. Chelsea says, “this is a perfect example of the right tree in the right spot.... We're in an area on the verge, we've got a lot of open space, so it really has a space to stretch its wings as it gets bigger.” The tree currently sits at around 1m tall and has a single leader stem. Chelsea says, “We try to have a really low intervention approach... If you did have co-dominant leaders, you could just take those out... We leave all our lower leaves and stems on the tree until they naturally senesce, so they naturally die off as the tree’s getting larger.” Delaying branch removal encourages diameter growth for a strong thick stem that won’t be wobbly.
One of the important principals is pruning for purpose, and in a situation where breakage has occurred, Chelsea says, “the decision has been made for us, so now we need to remove this stem without doing any more damage.” Chelsea demonstrates the three-point-cut and says, “it means that we can take the weight out of this stem (and) keep us safe.” Firstly, cut the underside of the branch upwards, about a third of the way through the stem. The second cut is the top cut, a few centimeters to the side which will create a clean horizontal split in the wood. This is when the branch will fall, so step back and be mindful of your surroundings. The third and final cut is the target prune, at the branch collar of the trunk or stem. This will give the branch collar the best chance of sealing over. "A healthy tree will be able to callus over,” says Chelsea, “All of that tissue will roll around and eventually you won't even see that cut.”
Chelsea says when designing your garden, “it all comes back to choosing the right tree for the right place... All of our beautiful west Australian mallees; they're easy to prune, they're fantastic for smaller gardens.” Coppicing is a technique where you chop the tree back hard to trigger new growth. “You can coppice them and they'll bounce back perfectly,” says Chelsea, “there's an amazing adaptation for a lot of our small eucalypts, it's called a lignotuber and it's a specialized group of cells... It means that plants can regenerate after damage or fire.”
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