Garden Plant Care

Winter Pruning: How to Make Your Trees Grow Better in the Next Year

Pruning trees takes time and preparation, and winter is often the best time to get it done. Here, read about why pruning trees in the winter is a smart idea, which species will handle it best, and tips for getting started.

For many gardeners, one of the last tasks of the year is trimming trees. It might seem counterintuitive to prune in chilly weather, but winter is the best time to trim your trees for better growth in the summer. However, not all trees take well to winter pruning, and making the wrong choice can lead to problems for the tree in the long run.

Here’s a closer look at why it’s best to prune trees in the winter, and what you need to know to get started.

Why Prune in the Winter? Six Benefits

There are plenty of reasons to wait to tackle your tree pruning until winter. Here are the most significant advantages of doing so.

1. It’s Possible to Prune During Dormancy

In regions where the weather gets cold in the winter, trees go dormant. This means they stop their growth cycles and wait for warmer conditions to develop leaves and flower buds. Pruning during this dormancy phase means you aren’t hampering the tree’s efforts to put energy towards new growth, and often leads to vigorous growth by springtime.

2. Helps Protect Flower Production

The timing for pruning is crucial when you’re trying to maximize fruit or flower production. When you prune trees before they break dormancy, you run little risk of trimming off developing leaves and buds. This ensures you won’t compromise its production in the spring.

3. Trees are Easier to Shape When the Foliage is Gone

Trimming trees for a desired shape is much easier when the foliage is gone. Winter pruning is more efficient because you can see precisely what cuts are necessary for creating the right structure, and it’s often easier to tell which branches are dying or diseased and need to be removed.

4. Stops Diseases from Spreading

Not only do trees go dormant in the winter, but the pathogens and disease agents that infect them often do too. This means pruning trees in the winter lowers the risk that you’ll spread bacteria, fungi, or parasites from diseased sections to healthy, and helps you remove these trouble spots altogether.

Winter pruning is beneficial for avoiding the spread of Dutch elm disease, oak wilt, and most forms of fire blight.

5. Less Stress for the Trees

When trees get pruned, their natural reaction is to attempt to close the wound and go into overdrive producing new growth. This can lead to problems if water, sunlight, or nutrients are in scarce supply, as it can cause the tree to have a stress response. Worse, it leaves the tree more vulnerable to pathogens that can infect it from the wounds.

In contrast, pruning in winter while the tree is dormant gives it more time to heal the wound before generating new growth.

6. Improves Tree Safety Over Winter

Dead and dying tree limbs pose a real safety risk in the winter. Freezing conditions can cause branches to snap off, which could fall on structures or unsuspecting people below. Taking time to prune in the winter helps keep you and your property protected.

Which Trees Should You Prune in the Winter?

Not all tree species adapt well to winter pruning. Many species that bloom in the early spring should be pruned after their flowers die in the summer. Otherwise, you will cut off the buds and compromise flower production.

Some of the varieties that respond best to winter pruning include the following:

  • Evergreen shrubs and trees (late winter or early spring)
  • Shade trees like oak, maple, sweetgum, and katsura (late winter to early spring)
  • Apple (late winter or early spring)
  • Azalea (later winter or throughout the growing season)
  • Stone fruit like cherry, peach, and plum (later winter or early spring)
  • Dogwood (late winter or early spring)
Cold Weather Pruning Tips

Every tree is unique, so the way you’ll need to prune will depend on the variety you’re working with and your long-term goals for how you want the tree to develop within the space. Even so, there are some standard practices you can follow to set yourself up for success—no matter the variety.

  • Take time to research the recommended pruning strategy for each variety. The guidelines for pruning fruit trees you plan to harvest from, for instance, are very different than the guidelines for pruning a backyard shade tree.
  • Plan each cut based on your overall goals for the structure of the tree. Pay attention to the smaller overgrown branches that will block airflow and sunlight to the rest of the tree.
  • Cut each branch at the node (the place where branches connect to each other) for better tree structure and wound healing.
  • Prune in dry, mild weather. There’s no reason to freeze when pruning trees, so choose a day when the weather is warmer than average. More important—choose a dry day, so there’s less risk of fungal spores and other disease pathogens spreading and infecting healthy plant tissue.
  • Trees benefit most from pruning in their first few years because you can remove any branches that aren’t developing as desired to control their overall shape in the long run.
  • Make clean cuts that minimize the size of the wound to reduce the risk of contamination from pathogens. For extra protection, you can cover the cut site with pruning sealers.
  • Refrain from pruning too early in the winter. You don’t want the incision point to dry out if the temperature drops.
  • Prune away all dead and diseased branches first, and clean your tools before moving to healthier portions of the tree.

Pruning trees in the winter is a proven way to improve their health and set them up for vibrant growth by springtime. So long as you research your tree variety ahead of time to ensure it can handle winter pruning, you’ll be setting each tree up for success for the rest of the year.