10 Plants You Must NOT Prune in Late Winter

When I first started gardening, nothing intimidated me more than pruning. It felt so confusing and counterintuitive. And I constantly thought to myself, wouldn’t it be nice if there was a universal pruning calendar to tell me when I should and shouldn’t do it?

Alas, nature and our gardens fluctuate from year to year, depending on climate, season, weather and even micro-climate. So I found it more useful to learn just some basic rules about pruning, rather than the elusive hard cutoff dates I thought I needed.

And to my surprise, knowing when NOT TO prune proved equally as useful as learning the rules for when to do it.

Take, for example, late winter. There are so many popular plants that tempt us with their bare branches now. Should we cut them back?