Almost nobody kills a shrub with dull shears. They kill it with a calendar. Prune a North Florida shrub in the wrong month and you either cut off every flower for next spring or push out tender new growth right before a Jefferson County freeze takes it. Get the timing right and the technique mostly takes care of itself.
The golden rule: prune right after it blooms
Spring-flowering shrubs set next year's flower buds on old wood during the summer and fall. The buds are already sitting there, formed and waiting, long before you see them. So when somebody "tidies up" the azaleas in October, they are not trimming leaves. They are cutting off every single flower for next spring, and then wondering in March why the bush is green and bare.
So the rule is: if it blooms in spring, prune it right after it finishes blooming. That gives the plant the whole summer to grow and set new buds. Miss that window and you wait a full year.
- Azaleas: immediately after the flowers fade, and finish by early summer at the latest. After that you're cutting buds.
- Camellias: after bloom. Sasanquas finish in fall, japonicas in late winter, so prune each one on its own schedule as soon as it's done.
- Gardenias, spireas, and the other spring bloomers: same rule, right after flowering.
Summer bloomers that flower on new wood are the opposite: prune them in late winter while dormant, because they'll make their flowers on the growth they put out this year. Crape myrtle is the big one in that group.
The workhorse hedges
Most hedges around here are grown for foliage, not flowers, which gives you a wider window. Loropetalum, ligustrum, holly, boxwood and viburnum all take a shaping in late winter or early spring, with light touch-ups through the growing season as they push out.
Two notes. Loropetalum blooms in spring and gets sheared to death by people who then complain it doesn't flower. It'll live, but if you want the blooms, cut it right after they fade. And ligustrum grows like it's being paid to, so it wants a light shaping two or three times a season rather than one brutal cut in July. Whatever you trim, get the clippings out of the beds instead of letting them mat down on top of your pine straw or mulch.
Stop shaping any hedge by late summer or early fall. Every cut is a signal to push new growth, and soft new growth going into November has no chance against our first hard freeze.
Stop topping your crape myrtles
You can drive from Monticello to Tallahassee in February and count dozens of crape myrtles chopped off flat at head height, standing there like fence posts. People call it "crape murder" for a reason.
Here's what topping actually does. Cutting through thick wood removes the natural branch structure and forces the tree to erupt with a dozen skinny, whippy shoots out of every knuckled stub. Those shoots are weakly attached. They grow fast and long and then flop over under the weight of the flowers after a rain. The knuckles get uglier every year. And you have permanently traded a graceful multi-trunk tree with beautiful exfoliating bark for a coat rack. The tree does not need it to bloom. It was going to bloom anyway.
Proper crape myrtle pruning is light and takes about ten minutes, in late winter while the tree is dormant:
- Cut the suckers off at ground level.
- Remove branches that cross and rub each other.
- Take out the thin twiggy growth and any branch pointed straight back into the middle of the canopy.
- Remove old seed heads if you want, though you don't have to.
- Leave the main trunks alone. That's it. Step back and be done.
If a crape myrtle is genuinely too big for where it sits, the honest answer is that it was the wrong plant for that spot. Topping won't fix that, it just makes it a recurring chore.
Don't hard-prune going into winter
This one costs people real plants. A hard cut in October or November tells a shrub to grow, so it pushes soft, tender, unhardened shoots, and then we get a night in the low twenties and every one of them turns to mush. Sometimes the damage runs back into wood that would have been fine if you'd left it alone.
We are 8b here. Real freezes happen every year. Save your big structural cuts for late winter, once the worst of the cold has passed, so new growth breaks into warming weather instead of into a cold snap.
Prune freeze damage in spring, not in January
The morning after a hard freeze, half of Jefferson County wants to go cut the brown off. Don't. That brown foliage is insulating the wood underneath from the next freeze, and more importantly, you cannot yet tell what's actually dead. A branch that looks scorched will often push new leaves in March.
Wait until spring growth starts. Then scratch the bark with a thumbnail: green underneath means it's alive, brown and dry means it's gone. Cut back to living tissue and let the plant tell you where the line is. Waiting costs you nothing except a few weeks of looking at a brown bush.
Shears make a shell. Hand pruners make a plant.
Hedge shears cut every shoot at the same plane, which triggers dense growth right at the surface. Do that year after year and you build a solid green shell that shades out the interior. Open one of those hedges up and it's hollow inside: bare, leggy sticks with all the leaves on the outside two inches. Then one branch dies, you've got a hole, and nothing regrows to fill it because there's no light in there.
The fix is to thin by hand along with the shearing. Reach inside with hand pruners or loppers and take some branches out at varying depths, back to a joint, so light gets into the middle of the plant. Do that once a year and your hedge stays leafy all the way through. Also, taper the hedge slightly wider at the bottom than the top so the base gets sun and doesn't go bare.
Tools, cuts, and the one-third rule
- Sharp and clean. A dull blade tears and crushes stems, and torn tissue is an open door for disease. Wipe blades down between plants, and definitely disinfect between a diseased plant and a healthy one.
- Cut to a joint. Prune back to a bud, a side branch or the trunk. Don't leave stubs sticking out into the air. They die back and rot.
- Never remove more than about a third of the plant at one time. More than that and you're shocking it, and shocked plants in a Florida summer are the ones that don't come back.
Rejuvenating an overgrown ligustrum or holly
Some shrubs are just too far gone: twenty years old, ten feet tall, hollow, woody, three bare trunks and a hat of green on top. For tough plants like ligustrum, holly and some viburnums, you can rejuvenation-prune, cutting them back hard, sometimes to knee height, in late winter so they have the entire growing season to rebuild. It looks brutal and it feels wrong, and then it comes back thick from the base.
The gentler version is to do it over three years: take out a third of the oldest trunks each winter and let new shoots fill in behind them. That way you never have a bare spot in the front yard. And be honest about the plant. Some shrubs are past saving, and the right move is to pull them and replant something that fits the spot, which is really a design question rather than a pruning one.
Hedges, crape myrtles, azaleas and overgrown foundation plantings are the bulk of what we handle on the landscaping side, and we schedule them by what the plant needs, not by when it's convenient to bring the shears. If your shrubs have gotten away from you, send us a message and we'll walk the yard with you.