What Is Fancy Pruning - Our Top 6 Examples
Fancy pruning
When we say fancy pruning, we mean high maintenance. The six types of “fancy” pruning we review are creative, beautiful, interesting and fun but they are not easy. To create and maintain these results takes a lot of vision, time, patience, expertise or money. That is why you rarely see them in an average garden.
*All definitions via Wikipedia
Fancy Pruning - Espalier
Espalier; is the horticultural and ancient agricultural practice of controlling woody plant growth for the production of fruit, by pruning and tying branches to a frame. Plants are frequently shaped in formal patterns, flat against a structure such as a wall, fence, or trellis.
Oftentimes, you see fruit trees as Espaliers because they respond well to this type of pruning.
Fancy Pruning - Pleaching
Pleaching is a technique of interweaving living and dead branches through a hedge, creating a fence, hedge, or lattice. Trees are planted in lines, and the branches are woven together to strengthen and fill any weak spots until the hedge thickens.
Pleaching can be confused with Espalier, but Espalier is usually a singular tree, whereas pleaching is multiple trees woven together.
FANCY PRUNING - BONSAI
Bonsai, Japanese: ’tray planting’, is the Japanese art of growing and shaping miniature trees in containers, with a long documented history of influences and native Japanese development over a thousand years, and with unique aesthetics, cultural history, and terminology derived from its evolution in Japan. Similar arts exist in other cultures, including Korea’s bunjae, the Chinese art of penning, and the miniature living landscapes of Vietnam.
Truly artisan work.
Fancy Pruning - Pollarding
Pollarding is a pruning system involving the removal of the upper branches of a tree, which promotes the growth of a dense head of foliage and branches. In ancient Rome, Propertius mentioned pollarding during the 1st century BCE. The practice has been common in Europe since medieval times, and today it is used in urban areas worldwide, primarily to maintain trees at a determined height or to place new shoots out of the reach of grazing animals.
Pollarding is a more common practice in Europe.
A London Plane tree in Disney World that has been Pollarded.
Fancy Pruning - Topiary
Topiary is the horticultural practice of training perennial plants by clipping the foliage and twigs of trees and shrubs to develop and maintain clearly defined shapes, whether geometric or fanciful. The term also refers to plants that have been shaped in this way. As an art form, it is a type of living sculpture. The word derives from the Latin word for an ornamental landscape gardener, topiaries, a creator of Topia or “places”, a Greek word thatthe Romans also applied to fictive indoor landscapes executed in fresco.
This is a common type of topiary available at nurseries. Once you bring it home you need to keep this shape with continues pruning.
Picking the right types of plants is an important part of being successful.
Creating these shapes takes a lot of vision, time and patience.
Fancy Pruning - Shrub Signs
The use of shrubs to create a sign is technically created by planting shrubs to spell out the message, however ongoing pruning is needed to keep it crisp.
The Cape Cod Sign at The Bourne rotary made up of several spreading Yews
Even though we consider ourselves pruning experts we do not offer many of these services.
“It’s a small world, but I wouldn’t want to paint it.”
― Steven Wright
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