How to: tidy up Potentilla (and Spirea, and other small summer-flowering shrubs) over the winter

Here's a quick question which came in the other day: what does "one" do with shaggy Potentilla bushes, over the winter?

Should "one" cut them back? Or leave them?

All of the following, by the way, can also be applied to other smallish, summer-flowering garden shrubs with an untidy habit, such as Spirea.

By coincidence, I gave one of these useful shrubs its annual tidy-up, just the other day, so I can actually provide photos for this topic!

Here's the little beastie in question: how's that for a scruffy mess?

It's in a funny position, just on the edge of the paving, somewhat smothered by the Genista in front - that's the green thing - and with a very large Box topiary behind it.

So it's not a particularly well-favoured spot.

I have to prune this poor thing every year, because it hangs over the paving, as you can see, and if it got much bigger, it would be a bit of a trip hazard. And what you can't really see is that it's at the top of a flight of steps.

Not a good place to trip.

So every year, at some  point between it dropping all the leaves in autumn, and starting to sprout again in spring, I give it a good haircut.

Digression: the pruning of these small, tangled shrubs is never quite "textbook", because the books all say that you should prune out one in three of the oldest stems every year, just as you would for larger shrubs such as Viburnum.

But it's often hard to work out which stems to cut, and they are often more of a tangled mass, rather than a collection of neat stems.

As background to this article, I used to have a Client who had three identical, well-established Spirea in a bed, and one year we did an experiment: one was cut back with the shears, one was painstakingly pruned, removing one in three of the oldest shoots (a horrible job, as the branches were so inter-twined), and the third was done half-and-half: I carefully removed a few of the oldest branches, then sheared over the tops of what was left.

This left us with one bush at the original height, but thinned: one small round clipped one: and one which was quite literally half-way in-between.

Later than summer, I reviewed these shrubs, and you honestly could not tell which one had had which treatment.

I just wish I could find the photos.....

Anyway, the point is, with small congested shrubs such as Potentilla and Spirea, I now don't waste time trying to prune them beautifully, according to RHS recommendations: I just take my secateurs or shears, depending on their size, and reduce them down to a neat ball.

Like this:

I've also included the pile of cuttings, to give you an idea of how much came off.

As this is a small one, I did it with secateurs, and it took about, ooh, twenty seconds.

Here's a closer view, from above:

As  you can see, just a simple chop into a roughly rounded shape.

I did rake through it with my daisy grubber, to pull out any dead material, but otherwise, that's it. 

I do this every year....

 

 

...And this is how well it recovers, every year.

 

So there you go, when faced with small shrubs with untidy growth habits, don't worry too much about the "one in three" pruning rule, just hack them down - errrr, prune them carefully, I mean - into neat shapes.

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