Last week, I pruned our pear trees, quince, and rose bushes. Still on tap for this weekend: the apple tree.
December begins our dormant time. Even we hibernate here, despite the lack of snow and freezing temperatures. We don’t have to worry about frost damage or frozen roots, but we do notice the seasons of our plants, just like anywhere else. The leaves dry out and collect on the ground, flowers are long gone, and you might find one forgotten shriveled quince, half-eaten by a bird or rodent, still hanging from its stem.
We inherited these plants with the house we rent, and they’d been neglected. That first year, we could identify the pear blossoms, we could identify the apples (that at first we thought were crab apples but have since gotten bumper harvests), of course we could identify the roses and I was immediately intimidated, and it took some Googling to figure out what the heck the large, hard, fuzzy quince fruits were.
I read about how if you prune flowering hard plants too early, they get confused and start putting out buds too soon. You don’t want roses and pear blossoms in the winter, when the rain can pull them off their branches and they never have a chance to become fertilized and fruit. When the sun isn’t strong enough to feed them.
But, if you don’t prune them, they put out branches straight up into the air, that can’t support fruit. They become entangled and stunted. They become, like our pear and quince did, almost indistinguishable in a maze of twigs. If you don’t prune them, they won’t make new branches and grow in the direction they need to go. They’ll have fewer flowers and fewer fruits.
Isn’t that what this season is for: hibernation, senescence, choosing the right time to prune—not too early and not too late—so that when it is time, we can blossom?