How To Prune Butterfly Bushes // Get BIGGER & BETTER Flowers & Better RESULTS

Well, it looks like spring has finally arrived. After a long, cold, dreary winter it feels great to get the opportunity to come out here, be out in the garden and to do little projects, things that are going to get our plants off to a good start and give us lots of interest and color through the whole of the growing season. And right now, in early spring, just as the plants are starting to grow it's a great time to start thinking about pruning and clipping back some of the plants in our gardens. And here, right beside me, is a beautiful little butterfly bush. This is Buddleia Prince Charming, a little, short, compact growing plant that only gets to about three and a half to four, possibly at most, five foot high, with really gorgeous flowers that butterflies and hummingbirds and pollinating insects love. And while this is really a good example of a top-class flowering shrub that will grow and flower on its own without any attention, there's a couple of things that we can do to them to make sure that we get the very best from them. And here's what I want to show you that you can do at this time of year now, in early spring. Now the neat thing about Buddleias is once you get them established, they really require very little maintenance. And if you're looking for a flowering shrub that answers a wide range of different things that we're looking for in our gardens, Buddleias do it. Once they're established, they're remarkably heat and drought tolerant. You can go through during the summertime and clip the flowers and bring them indoors for indoor decorations. The beautiful little flowers that are on this are very attractive to butterflies and hummingbirds, and that brings in lots of winged visitors, really beautiful. But I suppose one of the biggest things that in this area certainly that people like is the fact that normally deer don't bother with them. Now they come in a variety of types and sizes. Some are small compact growing ones, some are medium-sized ones that are five, six, seven, eight foot high, and also there's some lofty giant ones too, that believe it or not can get as much as 15 foot or more. But they all have one thing in common, and that is that they grow out and flower on the current year's wood. Now if you didn't prune them, these growths that are on here now will all grow out and they will carry flowers. But the plant will tend to be scrubby and twiggy with small flowers and really not give off of its best qualities. So one of the things that's really good to do now at this time of year just as the growth is beginning is to go in and prune them fairly hard down here at the base because that's the stuff then that stimulates lots of growth as you see on these shoots here. These are ones that were made last year, they grew out from the base, and this if you look here is the remains of the old flowers from last year. So the more growth that we can stimulate from the base of the plant, the stronger and more attractive and beautiful the plant is going to be. Now just to explain things a little further, this is a small plant I should be able to prune it with my pruners, but if you had some of those big ones I'm talking about with thick stems, you might have to get yourself a pair of these long handle pruners or in fact even a saw to cut through some of the stronger wood. But here on this plant a good sharp comfortable pair of pruners should do the trick. Now when you look into the plant you'll see that it is pretty much already starting to tell you what you should be doing. With this you'll see that it's growing away here at the base, it's also growing away too at the top, but this is really the stuff that we want to encourage. This is where we start pruning it back here at the bottom. Now a word just to mention that if you come from some of the colder areas in our region, you might find that the entire top of your butterfly bush is all dead. That is natural, that happens in colder zones, but the crown, the root of it down here should be alive and you should start to see some young growth here coming out from the bottom, and if you're in a colder zone a little trick with that sometimes is just in autumn put up a little bit extra mulch around the crown of the plant, that will insulate it, help it to get through the winter time and then when you scratch it back in the springtime, that wood, that crown of the plant will be alive. But here as you see in this area, it's very much alive and wanting to grow. So with pruners you go in and you cut back these stems, in this case about five or six inches from the ground. If you were having a stronger growing, bigger plant, you might come up to about nine or maybe twelve inches from the base. There's a lot of little thin twiggy growth in here too, you can take that out. So just remove all of that little twiggy growth, a lot of it is kind of so small and insignificant it's not going to do anything, but as you see what I'm doing here is just cutting back the stems and now these young growths here are going to grow out and that's the powerhouse that's going to generate lots of flowers later on in the summertime. So there as you see it's just really a matter of going in and trimming back all of the old branches, getting it back so that it provides a place for the young growth to generate and come from. Here's where it was pruned incidentally last year, you'll see how all of these stems grew out from there and as you see I'm just really working my way around the plant, giving it a fairly serious chop back and that will generate lots of nice strong vigorous growth and gorgeous raspberry pink flowers that of course is going to be packed with lots of nectar that's going to be highly attractive to all sorts of gorgeous butterflies and hummingbirds and pollinating insects too. Now when I show you close here on the stems that they're hollow you will see how the center of the plant, the stems here have a kind of hollow center that's not really so much to worry about but it is one of the reasons why I like to do this in early spring so that there's the minimum amount of period of water and rain and freezing conditions on the hollow stems because when that happens you might get some die back but by doing it now when there's plenty of growth happening from the clump that means that these will very quickly grow away and provide a nice strong healthy vigorous plant. And then after you've cleaned away your trimmings the last thing to do is to just give it a dressing with a well-balanced fertilizer. At this time of year when you put this on it will very quickly start working in the soil supplying nitrogen, potash and phosphate and also the little trace elements too. This is a slow-release fertilizer which I like because I only have to do it once and it will continue to feed continually through the season providing nutrient that's going to sustain the growth and in this case we're talking about two or three teaspoons per plant which you just sprinkle around the perimeter of the plant and in no time at all when it rains this is going to start getting into the surrounding soil it's going to get those roots going it's certainly going to get those shoots going and then we're going to get lots and lots of gorgeous larger than usual flowers that's going to be an absolute picture during the summertime. This is David Wilson, enjoy your gardening it's good for us and it's very good for our environment too.