HERBS > ROSEMARY > PRUNING

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ROSEMARY GUIDES

rosemary plants with tall green leaves growing outdoors

Cuttings PropagationHarvestingPruning

Rosemary is an implausibly useful plant life to grow in your garden and is also a great familiar flora for wildlife attraction and pest control .

It is also , of class , a popular culinary herbaceous plant , and you may also use it in a wide stove of other means in your home .

a pair of secateurs lying on a metal work surface outside in front of lots of potted garden plants

When placed in the right positioning , rosemary can be an first-class low - maintenance industrial plant and will generally take up very little of your sentence .

Pruning is one element of flora care to think about when develop this evergreen plant herbaceous plant , but even this chore is not enormously complicated or time - consuming .

When pruning rosemary , here are the basic things to keep in creative thinker :

magnified view of secateurs being used to prune back rosmarinus officinalis plant

Do You Need To Prune Rosemary?

Rosemary does not necessarily have to be snip at all .

However , there are a number of reason why pruning can be good when growing rosemary in your garden .

Pruning rosemary will :

a hand holding rosemary sprigs up in front of a garden background

Pruning Over Winter

Rosemary is H4 intrepid , which means it is hardy through most of the UK .

However , during a harsh winter , especially if you hold up in the Frederick North or a colder region , tips on a rosemary bush may sometimes blacken and experience some icing damage .

Here in Fife , Scotland , my rosemary occasionally experiences a petty impairment after a hard winter , though this has not stopped the works from growing into quite a large and bushy shrub .

secateurs being used to cut back overgrown rosemary

In the spring , I will check over the industrial plant , and where there are areas of hurt , I will but prune these off .

The legal injury is never panoptic , so this just involves giving the plant a light trim .

Pruning After Flowering

The rosemary I have on the gay fringes of my forest garden does not blossom , which is probably because the conditions are fertile there and rosemary blossom best in poor and very free - draining grease .

However , since I am most interested in growing rosemary as an aromatic herbaceous plant for culinary and other house uses , I do n’t mind this .

Where rosemary does flower well , the flora is typically pruned lightly for maintenance like a shot after flowering .

purple flowering rosemary growing as hedging

Rosemary flowers in late spring or early summer , so whether peak actually organise on your plant or not , this is the undecomposed time to give the plant a passementerie .

Generally mouth , less is more when it comes to pruning rosemary .

Maintenance pruning generally just involves remove tip growth and unsightly offset here or there as need to keep a bushy habit and a pleasing physique .

I do n’t really prune my rosemary as such , but veritable harvest fundamentally come to the same thing , since I regularly remove small sprig for preparation and larger stems for dry .

I will generally glean or prune from the top 15 - 20 cm of the mature flora .

Reducing The Size

If you would wish to slim down the size of a rosemary shrub and keep it in verification , you may give it a trimming all over , but you should take care not to reduce branches too much in distance and ensure that you do not disregard right back any woody material .

Flowers will form on the current or previous year ’s ontogeny and pruning too much can quash or even eliminate flower the next year .

Shaping For Hedging

If you are growing rosemary for hedging or topiary , then you may trim it to keep its Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe in spring , then again in former summer for a neater and more orderly maturation habit and pattern .

recollect about the shape that you would like to attain , then simply lightly pare to achieve the soma you desire .

Take care not to prune any after in summer or in fall , because this can advance cranky new increment that is less likely to make it through the wintertime months unscathed .

Rejuvenating A Mature Shrub

Mature rosemary shrubs that have become leggy and woody might reply to hard pruning , though you will lose any flowering that there may have been , and should still not remove more than a quarter of the industrial plant .

Pruning back by around a quarter in bound may rejuvenate your shrub .

However , generally speaking , it is good to take cutting or level the rosemary shrub and replace one that has become overgrowth and woody altogether .

“ I find that laborious pruning can rejuvenate a straggly Rosemary , but will have its limit point , ” shares Colin Skelly , a Master Horticulturist .

“ If you need to prune hard , take cuttings from the deletion cloth . If it fails to reply or becomes straggly again , which is likely after a twelvemonth or two , then you will have replacements ready . ”