Prune rosebushes in winter

Periods of lingering snow have formed a welcome blanket for shivering if drowsy flower buds this winter, and the snow has also provided a brilliant backdrop for big shrubs and small trees.

These woodies are at their least showy in deep winter, but they invite study of the textures and patterns of their bark along with the ornament of last years lingering pods and this years swelling buds. They catch the eye mostly, though, with their silhouettes in the landscape. The snow draws starker outlines.

Adrian Higgins

Adrian Higgins has been writing about the intersection of gardening and life for more than 25 years, and joined the Post in 1994. He is the author of several books, including the Washington Post Garden Book and Chanticleer, a Pleasure Garden.

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I never tire of looking at a bottlebrush buckeye that sits on a hill about 30 feet from the kitchen window. It has grown in the past 20 years or more from a twig into a tall spreading shrub 15 feet high and 12 feet across. In leaf, it forms a fabulous screen of just the right scale. Now, it presents a pleasing tracery of charcoal gray branches.

It has reached maturity, stopped growing, for the most part, and rewarded patience with its little perfection. If I had been in a rush and planted a cedar or pine in its place, I would have been pleased for the first five years and fighting a giant thereafter. The world is full of trees that have outgrown their spaces and full of people trying to hack them back.

Hacking is bad, but pruning is good, or can be, if you know what youre doing. This is the season for pruning many of the deciduous woodies, but if you dont know why youre pruning or what youre pruning, then leave the plant alone. Nor should you assume that the guy who delivers your mulch knows how to prune.

If you prune in an arbitrary or excessive way, the plant can respond by growing a load of gangly and weak suckers water sprouts and you see this on badly pruned apple trees and crape myrtles.

When you get manic about pruning, you sometimes stop looking at the pleasing architecture of the plant and begin to see everything that is wrong: a rubbing branch, a stem growing inward, a water sprout, a broken twig. All these can be fixed through artful pruning. This month and next form a perfect period for this: The shrubs are dormant, they have yet to use energy in pushing new growth and, in their naked state, you can see the branch structure.

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Prune rosebushes in winter