Do you fear to prune?

<p>Curtis Short wants you to look beyond the surface of your shrub and get in touch with its inner beauty.</p><p>The plant man, whose expertise is aesthetic pruning, approaches cutting a shrub or a hedge with a sculptor's eye.</p><p>Don't just whack at the straggly end growth with an ominous pair of hedge shears, he counsels. That's like taking a machine gun to a gopher. Shear overkill.</p><p>Instead, spread open the leaves, explore its structure, and trim from within.</p><p>He calls it "unshearing," the art of thinning a plant from the inside.</p><p>Heavy-handed pruning can leave behind a ruin of tattered leaves, dying stubs and a dense shell of surface growth, not to mention a hollow center.</p><p>"A sheared shrub," he says, "will have a shorter life span. And it may not be as pretty as a non-sheared shrub."</p><p>Dense surface growth limits air flow, resulting in pest and disease problems. It can also leave the plant devoid of foliage inside, which means that in time, as the plant creeps beyond an acceptable size, there is nowhere to cut back to.</p><p>Pruning from within encourages foliage in the center of the plant, making it possible to maintain the plant at a more desirable size over time. Renewing interior growth like this, says Short, can increase the functional life of a plant and usually leads to more productive flowering.</p><p>"It means getting away from the top-down management of attacking the tops and sides with hedge shears," says Short. "Instead, you examine the inside of your plant, see how it branches and work with it from a new perspective."</p><p>The result: a loose, more naturally sculpted appearance, like a carefully layered haircut compared with whacking around a bowl.</p><p>"You might also find that you enjoy the artistry of liberating your plant's hidden form from the block it was previously sheared into," the pruner maintains. "It's a lot like Michelangelo searching for a lovely sculpture in a block of marble."</p><p>Short, who has a degree in plant science from UC Davis and studied landscape architecture through UC Berkeley Extension, approaches his work from both a scientific and an aesthetic standpoint. For 15 years he worked in Sonoma County under the moniker The Garden's Gardener, taking a holistic approach to gardening, whether pruning a climber or applying mulch.</p><p>But when he came back to the county after three years in rural Maine and New Brunswick, Canada, he found himself examining the landscape with fresh eyes.</p><p>"The thing that struck me most about the gardens in Santa Rosa, and especially in the retirement community where my parents live, was how much the shrubs are carved up into little shapes. I suspect we may have developed a culture of extreme shrub shearing in our Wine Country gardens because we can grow so many different plants so well that we tend to overplant and then feel the need to take drastic measures to rein in our garden's exuberance."</p><p>So he recast his trade, his mission -- to specialize in pruning.</p><p>Most types of shrubs can benefit from unshearing, whether deciduous or evergreen, broad-leafed like privet or conifers like juniper and cypress. In fact, the best time to prune conifers is March and April. They have only one annual flush of growth that ends by early summer, so you'll want new growth to cover any gaps, he says.</p><p>Short shapes deciduous shrubs in winter when they are leafless and he can see the plant's form. But most shrubs are best trimmed in early spring before the big flush of growth. Late summer can also be a good time, but Short warns against substantial thinning in the heat of high summer, when plants are already stressed and tender interior leaves might be exposed to sunburn.</p><p>Short and other pruners recommend consulting a solid reliable source like the "Sunset Western Garden Book" before embarking on any pruning project. It's already too late this year for many things, like fruit trees. And plants that have already budded out or blossomed should be left alone at least until they complete their bloom.</p><p>Some shrubs, like flannel bush (Fremontodendron), won't like any substantial pruning. And some plants should never be sheared. Photinia and English Laurel (Prunus laurocerasus), for example, are downright dowdy looking when their foliage is tattered from shearing.</p><p>"Some plants," says Short, "such as Nandina, Abelia, Leptospermum and Coleonema, have such lovely loose natural forms that I consider shearing them a crime."</p><p>You can reach Staff Writer Meg McConahey at 521-5204 or meg.mcconahey@pressdemocrat</p><p>.com.</p>