Pruning simplified A visual guide to 50 trees and shrubs

I was recently honored with an introduction to a beguiling new baby; her name is Selah, a mysterious Hebrew word that appears mostly in the Psalms. "Selah" is considered untranslatable. Perhaps it's a musical notation, calling for a break in the singing of those gorgeous sacred songs, or it could be an invitation for instruments to join in; it might also relay an emphatic amen, a "forever," or be an exclamation of praise. Whatever its meaning, it seems to invite a pause - to open up a space for the contemplation of what lingers in the air. The word "selah" was on my mind as 1 pored over the season's gardening books, each one of which, in its own way, exhorts the reader to stop and reflect on what happens when we put ourselves back into the natural world. Margaret Roach describes such moments of joy, refreshment and wonder in the indispensable a way to garden: a Hands-On Primer for Every Season (Timber, $30), a rewritten edition of a book she first published 21 years ago about her garden in the Hudson Valley. Roach's approach is a combination, as she puts it, of "know-how and woo-woo"; she lives surrounded by "life buzzing to the maximum and also the deepest stillness." Gardens are a form of memoir. Roach surveys all that has changed in three decades, including the "it" plants now considered invasive. (She deftly uses the word "hoicking" to describe tearing out unwanted scoundrels she once nurtured.) Tissue culture labs have proliferated and oncerare plants are available at big box stores; cherished nurseries have closed. Pests are proliferating, and weather becomes more unpredictable and extreme as our climate rapidly changes. Worms aren't the blessing we thought they were (there were no native earthworms in the northern United States); some, like the jumping worms from Asia, are destructive, not only to our gardens but to our forest ecologies as well. But all is not sadness: Roach now participates in bigdata collection, logging her bird and moth counts online. With her garden containing comic multitudes of frogs and snakes, she has learned to control her phobias. Trees have grown larger than her house. Her garden has become the place "where 1 can be myself." The book is organized by season, and contains instructions on planting, dividing, mulching and designing. Everyone needs the kind of friend Roach has, who looks up from your kitchen sink and asks if you really like "looking at the door of your car every day?" That's as good a place as any to start laying out a plan. Though "A Way to Garden" will be embraced by longtime tillers, 1 highly recommend it to new gardeners. Experienced veg-hounds will nod in agreement with Roach's "13 Things About Growing Tomatoes" - and be thankful for her instructions for skins-on tomato sauce to freeze. Roach, a natural teacher, rightly loves rules: With knowhow, you're halfway to winning the battle. One of her recent New Year's resolutions was simple: "Be thoughtful, keep weeding." Which brings us to the "woo-woo." ft peeks through every page, in dazzling photographs of algae-smeared frogs and curious snakes and a few of the 179 moth species she has identified so far. But the "woo-woo" goes much deeper. "The longer 1 live in Nowheresville, with its intimate window on the natural world," she writes, "the better 1 grasp my kindredness with other local species." "A Way to Garden" - sensitive, wise, deliberate, thoughtful and splendidly bossy - prods us toward that ineffable place where we feel we belong; it's a guide to living both in and out of the garden. New gardeners who don't want to lose years (and dollars) figuring things out for themselves would do well to invest in Alan Buckingham's the kitchen garden (dk, paper, $24.99). ft's the most straightforward and informative guide I've seen in a while, from a publisher that has a knack for elegant simplicity. Buckingham offers clear, simple, well-illustrated advice for month-by-month care: Harvest your first rhubarb and your last brussels sprouts in March; sow your broad beans, cauliflower and peas in October; cloche your endives in December. When it comes time to prune your trees and shrubs, don't make a cut without consulting pruning simplified: a Visual Guide to 50 Trees and Shrubs (Timber, paper, $19.95), by Steven Bradley, who offers instructions for formative, routine and, most useful in old gardens, remedial cutting for plants that have become leggy and unproductive. Neophytes should also park near their wheelbarrows a copy of the impeccable beginner gardening step by step (dk, paper, $22.99). Those of us who have been gardening for decades forget how overwhelming it is to confront things in your yard that have a will of their own. This volume will be a gift to every millennial on my list - all of whom refused to pay attention when 1 tried to trick them into gardening so many years ago. If you build that garden, they will come - the birds, the bees and the butterflies. 1 have added lots of unruly but fragrant fennel to my beds just for the thrill of watching the stained-glass wings of swallowtails morph from dapper dotted and striped caterpillars. There are innumerable guides to identifying these beauties, wings in the light: Wild Butterflies in North America (Yale University, $35), by the photographer and writer David Lee Myers, will make you fall in love first. Myers's assured photographs are beautiful; he bears witness to the depredations of a fragile winged life, which can last from a few weeks to a few seasons; delicate hairs are worn down, wings are tattered, legs crumple and curl. Myers somberly memorializes a smashed Pipevine Swallowtail, killed in Texas when it hit the windshield of his car. Butterfly habitats tend to be "inconspicuous or 'brushy' or 'weedy,' " Myers writes, and thus we don't protect them. Don't even get me started on our flagrant overuse of insecticides. Collectively, we "grievously wound Nature," and this is not only disastrous for the butterflies but, as Myers makes clear, disastrous for humanity too. "If there's a secret here, it's in slow seeing," he declares. "In slow seeing with quick eyes." Once you've got things blooming, take joy in armfuls of flowers for your table. Stuff them insouciantly into jam jars, if you will, but there can also be loads of artifice in that art form. BLOOMS: Contemporary Floral Design (Phaidon, $49.95) is an international survey. Here are blooms to bedazzle. How glad I am for creative souls like Emily Thompson of New York, whose imagination unspools to intricately bind up devil's walking stick, wild fennel, snake garlic scapes, turkscap lilies - and octopus. Or Flora Starkey, from London, who achieves a pristine chic with white tulips marching across a table in glass bottles. Katie Marx, an Australian, strings voile hammocks, swollen-bellied with red tulips, from the ceiling, while Lauren Sellen, of Coyote Flowers in Ontario, wraps a model in pink gauze and mauve hydrangeas. A man vomits dahlias into a toilet for Lisa Waud of Pot + Box in Detroit; in Tokyo, the showman Azuma Makoto encases flowers in enormous blocks of ice or burns them in pyrotechnic performance art. Here are blooms serving political purposes and blooms that are unabashedly decadent. Mere mortals can be forgiven our bunches of daisies, sloshing in glasses of water. Sometimes body and soul crave the quiet depths of green shade. Tree lovers, rejoice. The inimitable Michael A. Dirr has teamed up with Keith S. Warren to give us the tree book (Timber, $79.95). My copy of the classic "Dirr's Hardy Trees and Shrubs," from 1997, is a repository of desire, the pages ruffled with Post-it notes for fantasies of long-ago gardens. Then and now, the authors make the case for better planting in our "urban forests." Driving around cities, they notice trees that are diseased, uncomfortable or just plain wrong. Their monumental tome will be invaluable for landscape designers, urban planners and homeowners. You can zip straight through from Abies alba to Ziziphus jujuba, though I found it impossible not to get diverted; I got no further than Clethra barbinervis before I began planting a new generation of sticky notes. The authors' voices boom through, with prose that's lively and full of character. "The patriarch of Carya species," they write of the shagbark hickory, "almost inspires love at first sight, with its earthy steadfastness." Of Elaeagnus angustifolia, the notorious Russian olive, Dirr and Warren observe: "Let's start with the bad. This plant is invasive in 31 states. ... We wish it had been left in Russia." Water hickory is "a sleeper in the magical world of Carya" and the Kentucky coffee tree sends them into raptures: "To sit beneath one is a religious experience to a tree lover: The structure feels massive like an ancient cathedral, yet its foliage is as elegant as the stained-glass windows. We love this tree." May there be a contagion of such love. A few years back, Peter Wohlleben published a most unlikely best seller in which he provocatively (and controversially) discussed the ways in which trees communicate with one another, throwing off chemical and electrical impulses to warn their neighbors of stress and danger. Recently rereleased in abridged form as the hidden life of TREES: The Illustrated Version (Greystone, $35), accompanied by lavish photographs, it's an excellent introduction to a growing field of scientific understanding of what's actually going on in those "brainlike structures" found at the tips of a tree's roots. The "well-being" of trees "depends on their community," he argues - words that don't describe our urban forests, much less ourselves, although they ought to. Trees create their own ecosystems, love their saplings, won't abandon their dead. We're just beginning to appreciate these wondrously tangled communities. Wohlleben's book about trees was the first installment in what is now a trilogy called The Mysteries of Nature. In the second volume, "The Inner Life of Animals," Wohlleben upends our assumptions about the world outside our bodies as he observes love, grief and compassion among animals. The final installment is the secret wisdom OF NATURE: Trees, Animals, and the Extraordinary Balance of All Living Things (Greystone, $24.95). Here we read about the relationship between trees and fish, and how wolves and ravens share meat because the ravens keep watch for marauding bears. Wohlleben shares the story of a crow that thanked him for bird seed by leaving gifts on a fence rail. On the question of bird migration - are birds genetically (mechanistically) programmed for certain routes or do they learn from older birds? - Wohlleben reports on cranes that appear to decide collectively to alter their routes depending on the availability of food and breeding grounds. By the end of the book, it's clear that it's we humans who are extraordinary, in ways awful and awesome, dominating and exploiting the natural world, ceaselessly, ruthlessly, with little sense that we're imperiling ourselves and the generations to come. The balance Wohlleben describes isn't extraordinary, nor does it spring from wisdom. It's simply the real nature of life, an entangled, intermingled mess of overlap, reliance, symmetry, chaos, resilience and interdependence - the whole grand mess, lost to us when we stop seeing nature. But then someone with the compassion, generosity, curiosity, intensity and, yes, wisdom of Wohlleben reopens our eyes. I would never have guessed that someone could write an entire book about the coppicing of trees, much less that I'd find myself pleasurably immersed in what I (wrongly) thought was arcana, but, then again, any subject the poetical William Bryant Logan tackles is guaranteed to be rich and surprising. All serious gardeners should own my personal favorite (until now), "Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth." SPROUT LANDS: Tending the Endless Gift of Trees (Norton, $27.95) is a memoir of Logan's rediscovery of an ancient way of pruning trees - long out of favor, though in the rarefied circles of landscape designers, that is thankfully changing. It all started with a job. Logan is an arborist, and his firm was hired to pollard new trees in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. He wasn't really sure how to proceed with this highly visible task; both pollarding and coppicing involve heavy but selective regular cutting of major branches so they sprout thick new growth the next spring. May is "the time when the coppice springs," hence our term "springtime." People once lived with nature in "creative engagement," Logan writes, and this method preserved trees while giving people all they needed to make kindling, baskets, fences and other important tools. "In coppice and pollard, both people and trees were reciprocally active." Entire forests were once coppiced, and coppicing was practiced around the globe. Logan sought out experts to learn these pruning techniques in Spain, Japan and California. In Japan, he visits a small factory where every year four square kilometers of woodland are cut to make about 20,000 tons of charcoal. The University of California, Berkeley, is, he reports, "awash in pollarded London planes." Archaeologists have studied Neolithic settlements in what are now Prance, Switzerland and Germany and have deduced that coppicing led to the invention of streets. Because it's a way of harvesting that leaves root in the ground, coppicing protects wildlife and prevents soil erosion. In ancient days, Logan notes with characteristically wry profundity, people "knew what was good for them better than we do." The naturalist Sy Montgomery offers remediation in her charming HOW TO BE A GOOD CREATURE: A Memoir in Thirteen Animals (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $20). She IS the author of books about tigers, octopuses, dolphins and apes, among others. In her memoir, Montgomery makes vividly explicit what she has learned from the animals with whom she has shared her life. As a child, Montgomery mortified her socially ambitious mother by insisting that she be called "Pony," as she believed she was really a horse. She dressed a stuffed baby caiman in doll clothes and pushed it around in a pram. She revered Jane Goodall and her famous chimp studies. And by the time she was 26, the sight of three six-foot-tall emus in the Australian outback had set her on her life's path: "leaving all that I loved behind" to conduct field research on wild animals. Atiny pig with a big personality teaches her that it's O.K. to be different. Clarabelle, a friendly tarantula, as "immaculate" as a cat, visits a schoolroom in Trench Guiana on Montgomery's husband's hand. "Elle est belle, le monstre," one little girl murmurs, getting over her fear. Montgomery's description of the octopus Octavia's death, and the way she said farewell by gently but firmly attaching suckers to Montgomery's arm, brought me near tears. "You never know, even when life looks hopeless, what might happen next," Montgomery writes. And here we must pause. Selah: Pause to acknowledge that we are receiving altogether too many signals of stress and danger. Selah: Pause to ponder the complex, miraculous web of life that we inhabit. Selah: Pause to welcome a new generation, picking up wherever we leave off, learning to get back to the garden. May all our tree-huggers and animal lovers, all our writers and thinkers, hands and hearts deep in the soil (or tickling the backs of spiders), help us to see how we too might become better creatures. DOMINIQUE BROWNING, formerly the editor of House & Garden, is the founder and director of Moms Clean Air Force. She is an associate vice president of the Environmental Defense Fund.

British horticulturist Bradley, known for his long career providing gardening advice, focuses his latest book on the evergreen subject of pruning. He outlines the many reasons for pruning, basic pruning techniques, and necessary equipment in brief, using general terms to start with, before moving on to the specific details for pruning 50 plants commonly grown in residential gardens. Each plant is given a two-page spread that includes reasons for pruning; the best time to prune; other plants that can be treated in a similar manner; which tools should be used; plant-specific tips; and techniques for formative, routine, and remedial pruning. Illustrations show the natural growing habit of the plant; placement for both routine cuts and those for dead or defective growth; and proper tool placement for healthy, beneficial cuts. Finally, short sections address deciduous and coniferous trees, hedges, climbers, and ground cover. Specialized techniques such as pollarding, coppicing, pleaching, and more are covered with a few paragraphs each. Appendixes include a glossary and tables offering quick reference for pruning time, no- and low-prune plant options, and plants that work as hedges with or without trimming. This comprehensive guide on a topic of interest to virtually all gardeners is highly recommended for public library collections.--Anne Heidemann Copyright 2010 Booklist

Introduction At its simplest, pruning is a means of manipulating a plant's growth, shape, and productivity by cutting and training it to achieve what you want to happen. To prune plants well is not so much about knowing how and where to cut but about knowing what you are trying to achieve. The main reasons for pruning are to train a plant to grow in a particular way, to balance its growth, to control the production of flowers and fruit, to maintain its health, and to restrict its growth. A final type of pruning, remedial or renovation pruning, may also be necessary from time to time. Careful pruning in the early years--often referred to as formative pruning--will allow you to create a plant that is well-proportioned, attractive, and that carries flowers or fruits where they are visible and easily reached for picking. A tree or shrub with well-spaced stems and branches with good angles will reduce the risk of breakage and stem splitting. Plants pruned correctly while they are young are easier to care for in later years. Time spent on training and pruning young plants should be regarded as an investment in their future and as a time-saving, long-term benefit for the gardener. A healthy plant should show signs of vigorous, active growth, especially when it is young and establishing itself. Most plants will start to flower earlier in their lives if they are allowed to grow naturally. Young woody plants will often produce only a few flowers until they are established. As plants mature and begin to flower and fruit on a regular basis, the production of shoots will slow down, with fewer and shorter new shoots being produced each year. As plants age, there is less annual growth. While leaves are produced on older and on younger wood, it is often the younger wood that produces the flowers. From the gardener's point of view, it is important that a plant's shoot growth and flower production are going on at the same time. Pruning should strike a balance, allowing woody plants to continue producing young woody stems while providing a regular display of flowers and fruits. Often, the timing of pruning can maintain this balance. Pruning plants in late winter and early spring, for example, often encourages the plant to produce lots of new shoots, whereas pruning in midsummer can induce a plant to produce more flower or fruit buds for the following year. Removing old flowerheads (deadheading) to prevent plants from producing seeds will help to extend the flowering season if their energy is not devoted to producing seeds. As plants develop a cycle of flowering and fruiting regularly, they often slip into overproduction. You have only to look at a rose or crabapple that has been left unpruned for a number of years to see that the more flowers and fruit a plant produces, the smaller they become. Often, too, the flowers and fruits on the inner sections of the branches are not only small but of poor quality. Pruning away some sections of stems and branches allows you to remove some of the poorer stems altogether. Pruning weak stems also diverts energy into the production of larger, though fewer, flowers and fruit. A good example of this is the butterfly bush ( Buddleja davidii ). On an unpruned bush there may be profuse quantities of flower spikes, each about 4in (10cm) long. A plant that is pruned regularly and at the correct time of year, however, will bear a smaller number of flower spikes, but each may be 12in (30cm) or more long. Some plants don't have particularly nice-looking flowers--in fact, some plants produce flowers that are barely noticeable--but other characteristics do make them attractive garden plants. A number of deciduous shrubs, including dogwoods ( Cornus spp .) and willows ( Salix spp .), have colored bark that is especially bright in winter, and other plants, such as some hazels ( Corylus spp .) and elders ( Sambucus spp .), have large, colorful leaves in spring and summer. These colored stems and large leaves are produced only from the current season's growth, and the more vigorous this growth is, the better the effect will be. In both instances, the vigorous growth can be achieved only by severe pruning, often cutting down whole plants to within 4-6in (10-15cm) of ground level each year. Combating pests and diseases is a vital part of gardening. Often the best method of control is prevention, either before a problem becomes established or even before it begins. Good pruning can preempt some serious problems, and good formative pruning to encourage strong stems and wide angles where branches join the main trunk will reduce the chance of branches splitting or breaking and providing a site where pests and diseases can take hold. Many of the diseases that attack woody plants damage the wood and hence the whole structure of the plant. Disease often enters through dead tissue, such as a wound or injury, and is spread throughout the live, healthy parts of the plant. This is why the first part of any pruning process should be removing dead, dying, diseased, or damaged wood (the four Ds) before the real pruning begins. If there is any suspicion of disease, look for telltale signs, such as a brown staining in the wood on or just under the bark. Always cut back to healthy sections of branch or stem where there is no staining. Pruning to create a good, open structure will allow a free flow of air around the branches. This reduces the chance of diseases, including mildew, and helps to reduce hospitable areas for pests such as aphids that find shelter and become established in weakened and sheltered sites on plants. Simply changing the time of year that you prune your plants can combat certain diseases. Oak wilt can kill strong, healthy oaks within a few years if it gains a foothold. The beetles that carry the oak wilt disease are active from late April through June in most parts of the country, so it is best to prune oaks in winter, when the beetles are not active. Cutting down tall roses to half their height in an exposed garden will prevent them from rocking in the wind and suffering root damage through the winter. Excerpted from Pruning Simplified: A Step-By-Step Guide to 50 Popular Trees and Shrubs by Steven Bradley All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.