
Perennials: You can cut back tall, late summer to fall-blooming perennials such as asters by about half around this time. Plants like balloon flowers, boltonia, chrysanthemums, asters and Russian sage will benefit, as the pruning stimulates additional branching and a more compact form. You’ll increase the number of blooms, create sturdier stems and decrease height at the same time. With the balloon flowers, wear gloves, because cut stems exude a latex-like sap that some people react to. You can use rubbing alcohol to clean pruner blades afterward. Generally if this is done in early to mid-June, it will not set back the date of flowering too much. If done later than July 1, it is likely to set back flowering more significantly.
Winter damage: Reports of significant winter damage have been coming in for some time now. We are seeing particularly severe damage on Euonymus (burning bush), Japanese maples, some species of viburnum, Chinese dogwood (Cornus kousa), boxwood and some lilacs. The likely contributing factors are very warm temperatures late into the fall followed by a plunge into subzero temperatures that lasted for a number of days. Some plants, especially marginally hardy ones like Japanese maples, Chinese dogwood and broadleaf evergreens like the boxwood did not go into dormancy properly and likely, this contributed to the damage.
What usually happens with winter kill is that vascular tissue, which functions to allow the plant to pull up water from the soil and stored carbohydrates from the roots is damaged. The cambium layer of cells is just under the bark, so prolonged cold temperatures on their own can be damaging, but the preceding warm weather made things worse.
Some plants, like my Japanese maple, which has thinner bark, experienced bark cracking that made the vascular tissue freeze and dry out — those limbs are toast for sure!
Most damaged plants have been slow to leaf out and it is hard to tell what the overall level of damage is. Some plants may have a few unaffected or lightly damaged branches. Some have branches that had enough stored energy or just enough slightly damaged tissue to be able to push out buds or start to leaf out, but then subsequently, the bud/leaves withered and died. Some plants have latent buds pushing out new growth at the base of the plant or along a main stem or trunk, trying to regenerate the plant.
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