Cold Climate Gardening

Forsythia before pruning beganBack in April, I discussed my upcoming plans to prune my forsythia bush. It wasn’t flowering very much, and my commenters agreed with me that it needed a heavy pruning. Some even suggested cutting the whole thing down to the ground. But I felt a little too nervous to do that.

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Remember the forsythia I pruned so that I could force some branches? It doesn’t look so floriferous out in the open, does it? (For comparison, check out the forsythias here.)

When I’m faced with a plant that’s not doing as well as expected, I try to analyze the situation before taking action. In the case of the forsythia, I observed that the flowers were only on the ends of the branches. If it were cold damage, I would expect the flowers below the snowline to bloom, and the ones exposed to the cold higher up on the shrub to be missing. That’s not the case, and besides, this variety of forsythia is supposed to be bud-hardy to 30 below zero Fahrenheit, and it didn’t get that cold this winter.

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The standard advice for pruning spring-blooming shrubs is to prune them no later than two weeks after they’re done blooming. This is because most spring-flowering shrubs, at least, all those commonly grown, develop their flower buds on the previous year’s wood. So if you prune them in high summer, or autumn, you are cutting off the wood that has the next spring’s flowers.
However, it is far easier to see the structure of the shrub you are pruning in late winter, when the temperatures have moderated somewhat but the shrub hasn’t leafed out or started blooming yet. And, in the case of forsythia, you can bring the prunings indoors, stick them in a container of water, and, in about a week, have forsythia blooming in the house. These in the photo were cut about a week ago, on one of those nice days just before winter returned.

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Pruning the apple trees is a rite of spring. In past years I had a tendency to get started late and finish in a somewhat hurried splurge of activity–tinged with a bit of panic that perhaps I wouldn’t get it done in time. This year I had to take a different approach.

Since I’m no longer living at home, I don’t have seven days out of every week in which I can choose when and how long to prune. I’m only home on Sundays, and Sunday afternoon is really the only time I have of that day free to prune. That means instead of having thirty days in a month when I can choose to prune, I have four or five. And that is assuming every Sunday afternoon is actually free and the weather is of acceptable quality.

I could, of course, have not pruned the apple trees at all.

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Forget the weeding. That was an anomaly. Back, sort of, to the real February. I say “sort of” because yesterday and today the temperature is hovering a bit above freezing, which is on the warm side for February around here. (Average high for the month is 30F, and my outdoor thermometer registers 35F right now.) More importantly, the sun was shining gloriously all day yesterday. Don’t ask me how to explain this, but it was spring sunshine. I don’t know the science behind it, I only know that there was a different quality to the light than there had been in weeks past, and I had to be out in it. Had to.

What kind of gardening can you do outdoors when the soil is frozen like iron? All right, yes, I concede I could have just gone out for a walk; there’s no law that says one has to be productive all the time. I did one better than a walk: I went on a pruning walk.

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On Friday the apple tree I bought from St. Lawrence Nurseries arrived. It came while I was out, and I didn’t get back until late in the day, exhausted from working. The tree was supposed to be planted as soon as possible, and since it wasn’t a cheap plant, I didn’t feel at leisure to put off the planting. Being a dutiful fellow, I ate supper and went out and planted the tree, even though I had a headache. Tired and working with a headache is not the best circumstance in which to plant the “present to myself.” I hope to mulch it on a pleasanter day and so redeem the situation.

Planting the apple sapling was only the beginning of my labors. There is more work that needs doing outside than I’ve time to do. Spring races ahead, and I race to keep up, dashing from one crisis to another. The sapling is in the ground, but the three grown apple trees desperately need pruning.

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I’ve been reading Lilacs for the Garden by Jennifer Bennett. It’s a much more approachable book than Fiala’s Lilacs: The Genus Syringa and has detailed information on numerous cultivars and species. I’ve discovered lilacs that bloom earlier and later than the ones in my garden, especially fragrant lilacs, especially hardy lilacs, and lilacs that do well in the South (not that I need them). Most enlightening was the chapter …

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