It’s a good thing to prune plants. However, we need to know why, when and how. There are several types of pruning, whose choice depends on the plant vegetative reaction, depending on where and when the job was done. Pruning has different purposes: to correctly set up the plant; to remove weak, dead, diseased or messy branches (caused by a continuous lack of maintenance); to encourage shrubs renovation to induce a better blooming. If the result we aim at is a plant that looks like it hasn’t been pruned, our choice will be a light-containing pruning together with a thinning.
On the contrary, drastic pruning, also called “tree topping”, that involves removing most of the tree foliage (as we can often see in our towns) is not part of a professional gardener’s DNA.
As a matter of fact “tree topping”, besides looking unsightly and being harmful to the plant, becomes dangerous with time. In fact, the removal of more than a third of a tree foliage provokes an energy-giving crisis within the plant and it will lead to weaker roots and branches, difficulties of healing in correspondence to large cuts, causing diseases, moreover, as mentioned above, roots tend to reduce, causing plant instability: it will just be a matter of time.
Fruit trees pruning is generally carried out according to their production; during summer we provide some return cuts and get rid of those suckers that would take away energy from our productive branches. During winter we cut the most vigorous branches off young trees, whereas on older trees we proceed with some foliage cleaning and thinning.