Pruning is an essential practice in landscape maintenance, though not all pruning methods benefit every property or plant equally. Mechanical trimming techniques are efficient and modern, but they often lack the precision needed to sustain plant health and encourage long-term growth. Rather than approach a bruise with a buzzsaw, hand pruning takes a surgical, personalized approach to tree care that emphasizes a preservation-focused mindset.
We’re sharing the benefits of hand pruning, which has become the preferred approach to address the challenges of maintaining the long-term health of valuable trees and other plants.
Enhances Long-Term Plant Health
Dead stems and branches impede healthy growth by preventing oxygen from reaching the rest of the plant. When these branches become afflicted with diseases, pests, or damage, the rest of the plant is susceptible to further damage without precise care. Mechanical shearing can remove the diseased branches, but it often removes more than necessary, reducing the plant’s ability to recover.
By contrast, hand pruning is done with precision to prevent harming the overall structure while promoting healing. With tactful hand pruning, tree care experts can reduce the exposure area of wounds, pests, and diseases without tearing healthy stems.
Encourages Natural Growth
Even when damage or disease has been healed, many plants can regrow unnaturally, resulting in structural weaknesses and long-term health issues. For example, over-shearing a diseased patch of branches can lead to weak branch attachments and excessive sprouting. As the plant recovers, these aggressive pruning techniques will result in an imbalanced structure that is more susceptible to breakage and disease in the future.
Selectively removing branches with hand pruning techniques encourages healthy, natural growth in recovering plants. This is why hand pruning has become a staple of long-term, sustainable plant care for homeowners invested in maintaining plant stability beyond simply reacting to diseases.
Improving Aesthetic Value
Hand pruning is a more subtle way for plant care experts to create the intended look and feel in a high-value landscape. Ornamental trees, for example, require a sense of symmetry and balance to maximize their aesthetic value to the property. This requires careful, continuous maintenance that only hand pruning can provide.
While hand pruning can improve the health of single plants, it can also improve the overall stability and design of the landscape. Plant care experts can shape plants in ways that complement their natural forms and open up the property to improved scenic views, imparting a sense of aesthetic integrity. In addition to benefiting the health of the plants, this also increases property value and curb appeal.
Reduces Hazards and Increases Safety
Mechanical shearing can remove dead and hanging branches, but this also encourages imbalanced growth, leading to an irregular growing structure. This can be dangerous for people, vehicles, and animals that traverse the property since broken, crossing, tangled, and low-hanging branches can pose unnecessary risks. Eventually, even structures can be impeded or damaged by this irregular growth.
Regular hand pruning reshapes trees and plants into healthier, more organic structures that are less likely to grow in hazardous configurations.
Customizes Care for Different Species
Each type of tree and shrub has distinct growing habits, structural needs, and pruning requirements. With hand pruning techniques, knowledgeable arborists can customize their pruning strategies for each species, season, and weather condition. This level of personalized care is just as important for thinning out a dense canopy of trees to promote air and light circulation as it is for pruning a young sapling to prepare it for healthy new growth.
Supports Sustainability
Over-shearing delicate greenery is an unsustainable practice for several reasons. Gas-powered trimming equipment increases the negative environmental impact of landscaping while prioritizing short-term fixes for landscape maintenance. Hand pruning techniques reverse these trends to give homeowners an environmentally friendly and sustainable care process that promotes healthy urban forests and increases long-term stability.
Learn More About RTEC Treecare’s Hand Pruning Techniques
At RTEC Treecare, our team uses hand pruning techniques to maintain long-term landscape stability with improved plant health, uniform growing structures, improved safety, and higher aesthetic value. We partner with our clients and follow up our in-depth landscape assessments with personalized pruning plans that acknowledge and service each plant species, arrangement, and landscape with a customized strategy.
Generic mechanical shearing can be efficient, but it can often lead to long-term issues of sustainability that do more harm than good. Contact our team today to learn how hand pruning can improve your landscape’s health and longevity while promoting environmental stability.
