Lilac bushes are a great beautiful addition to the garden. Apart from adding beauty lilacs are also laden with a sweet fragrance that wafts through the air from the mauve, pink, purple, or white blooms.
Lilacs are low-maintenance, easy-to-grow plants that only need a sunny spot with fertile, humus-rich, well-drained soil and can also be grown in containers.
Being a deciduous shrub, lilac trees lose their leaves every fall. Then they grow their new leaves and flowers the following spring on last year’s growth. But if lilac is left unpruned, then it will continue to grow abundantly and can spread to up to 9ft wide and 21ft high.
knowing when and how to prune lilac bushes will make sure that your shrub stays stunning, and beautiful and keeps producing its characteristic, fragrant blooms year after year.
So let’s dive into the article to find out how to prune lilacs.
When should you prune lilac bushes?
Pruning lilac bushes at right time reward you with healthy growth, evergreen foliage, and beautiful flowers.
The perfect time to prune lilac bushes is between April and June but only once after it has finished flowering. This might seem unusual and unbelievable, but lilac plants flower as per the last year’s growth.
So pruning the lilac bushes earlier rather than later, will not affect the following years’ flowers. It also applies to how to prune lilac trees too.
How to prune overgrown lilac bushes?
If your lilac has been ever left to its own devices, or probably you have inherited a large unruly tree, you might be looking for advice on how to prune lilac when it has become overgrown.
Lilac cultivars are very unruly shrubs and get very large and congested if neglected. To avoid this or to prune overgrown lilac bushes, remove about one in three stems each winter concentrating on the older or weaker shoots.
While pruning overgrown lilac bushes, it is recommended to wait until the late winter. Wait till the time when the plant is still dormant but all risks of frosts have passed because frosts could damage the wounds caused by pruning.
While pruning always starts by removing any branches of the plant that are dead, diseased, or rubbing. After that turn, your attention to the oldest parts of the tree. Cut these dead, diseased, rubbed, and oldest plant parts to the ground. However, it is that you do not prune more than a third of the tree to this level.
If your tree is very tall and has attained the highest size, consider removing some of its height. However, stay aware that this may mean your lilac doesn’t flower that year after reducing the size, though having a more aesthetically pleasing and small tree will be worth it.
If your lilac bushes are particularly large, repeat this process every winter or every other winter until the tree has attained a more manageable size.
In order to do this more aggressive pruning, you should also follow the maintenance pruning steps listed above once the lilac has finished flowering. It will continue the good work of the more rigorous pruning and will foster good pruning habits that will help you to keep your tree under control.
A step-by-step guide to pruning lilac bushes
Equipment required
Following is the equipment that is required to prune lilac bushes
- Bypass pruner
- Loppers
- Pruning saw (optional)
- Stepladder (optional)
Materials required
A mature lilac bushes
Guide to pruning lilac bushes
Deadhead your lilac bushes by removing the faded flowers.
While pruning, always begins with pruning lilac bushes by removing all of the shriveled blooms as they fade before pruning the stems. To do so, you need to first find the first pair of leaves beneath a faded flower cluster and snip just above those leaves.
It is recommended to learn how to use bypass pruning shears for this unless the stems are larger than ¼ inch in diameter. In that case, you also can try bypass loppers instead.
Remove the broken, dead, larvae-infested, or rubbing canes from the base.
For the next phase of your lilac bushes pruning, remove any canes that seem damaged or infested with various pests such as the lilac borer. It can be detected by certain symptoms on your plant like small holes at the bases of shoots, accompanied by sawdust, which often indicates borers.
Apart from that, if two canes are rubbing together, you can remove the weakest one to prevent it from damaging the stronger one.
Prune unnecessary features
While pruning, always starts by pruning dead or diseased stems, overgrown stems, pencil-thin suckers, and twiggy growth. Cut these unnecessary features back all the way to ground level. You can use a pruning shear or lopper to handle these stems.
Prune the older stems
After pruning the unnecessary features, it is necessary to prune the older plant stems. Older stems generally don’t have the capacity to grow flowers and young plants. So it is necessary to cut them off from the plant.
Remove Stems that are thicker Than 2 Inches in Diameter
This regular removal of the old stems will prevent your lilac plant from becoming too tall. So avoid cutting off the tops of long stems because this can leave the plant with an odd, unnatural, and unlike shape. If your plant has very large stems, you need to use a pruning saw to cut the stems.
Thick lilac stems can be very tough to prune. So be careful while cutting the large stems.
Prune Remaining New Stems
If you want your lilac to fill in more flowers and become shrubbier, it is necessary to prune the remaining new stems to an outward-facing bud. It means you need to prune just beyond buds that face away from the center of the plant. This technique will cause more branching, fill your plant with flowers, and create a denser shrub.
Propagate new lilac bushes with your lilac cuttings (optional).
After you have pruned your plant, you can now follow the next step that you can propagate new lilac bushes with your lilac cutting. This step is completely optional. You can use the pruned stems to propagate and grow into a new plant.
If you are looking for some information on how to propagate lilacs, always keep in mind that the cuttings should be at just the right stage to root properly. Those cuttings that snap promptly when you bend them are the best fit for propagation.
If your stem cuttings are too young and tender or too old and tough to snap, they might not work for propagation. In such a case, snip 3- to 5-inch cuttings with at least two leaf nodes each and follow these directions for rooting softwood cuttings.
Conclusion
As you have read the article this far, you might have known all the facts about how to prune lilac bushes and the perfect time to prune it.
Although lilac bushes are carefree, they get to benefit from regular attention. The main purpose of pruning a lilac plant is to shape it to enhance its look and increase bloom quality. This is all part of pruning lilac bushes and regular garden maintenance.
Pruning lilac bushes normally consists of removing dead or diseased branches and shaping up the shrub to enhance its growth and flowering. Occasionally, we prune them to reduce the size and renew the health of the bush.
