Isabel's Blog

Pruning your trees in the winter is extremely beneficial for your trees! Why does a tree go dormant? In the winter trees go dormant as they know there won’t be enough resources to support them in the winter months, including the water it needs to make energy and sugars to survive. It’s like how a bear hibernates for winter!

Pruning in the winter has many benefits to the tree including making it easier to survive with the loss of its canopy. In the winter you can better see which branches need to be cut and overall make cleaner cuts. Pruning in the winter will lower the chance of diseases and pests for the tree which is important. The most major benefit of pruning in the winter is the tree is dormant and it will not suffer from loss of branches as it is already shut down in the winter where in spring or summer you have to be more cautious on how much of the canopy and where you cut on the canopy, because the tree is depending on the leaves to provide it with energy for photosynthesis. The only downside of pruning in the winter is that you may miss some of the dead branches and where you missed will appear in the spring. Overall, pruning trees in the winter is extremely beneficial and your arborist may even give you winter prices!