Golden privet (Ligustrum ovalifolium ‘Aureum’) is a popular, fast-growing hedging plant known for its bright, variegated foliage. Pruning is important for its health, maintaining its desired shape, and enhancing its aesthetic appeal.
Why Prune Golden Privet
Pruning golden privet offers several benefits, including maintaining its desired shape and size. This practice promotes denser growth, which is beneficial for hedges, ensuring a full and uniform appearance. Regular trimming encourages new shoots and leaves, enhancing the plant’s vigor.
Pruning also encourages the vibrant golden coloration of the foliage by stimulating new growth. Removing dead or diseased branches improves air circulation within the plant and reduces disease spread. This contributes to the plant’s long-term health, preventing it from becoming overgrown or leggy.
When to Prune Golden Privet
The optimal time for significant pruning of golden privet is in late winter or early spring, before new growth begins. Pruning during this dormant period allows the plant to recover quickly and channel its energy into new growth as temperatures rise. This timing also minimizes stress on the plant and reduces disease or pest infestation.
For general maintenance and shaping, golden privet can be trimmed after its initial flush of growth in late spring to early summer. Light trimming can continue throughout the growing season, especially for formal hedges, to maintain their tidy appearance. Complete all significant pruning by late August to allow new growth to harden off before colder weather.
How to Prune Golden Privet
Pruning golden privet effectively requires sharp hand pruners for smaller stems, loppers for thicker branches, and hedge shears for shaping. Ensuring tools are clean and sharp makes precise cuts, helping the plant heal faster and reducing disease risk. Always wear gardening gloves when pruning privet, as its sap can be an irritant.
When making cuts, aim for a 45-degree angle just above an outward-facing bud or branch union. This technique encourages new growth to sprout in the desired direction. For routine maintenance, focus on light tip pruning to maintain shape and encourage density, removing only about one-third of the growth. Formal hedges benefit from regular trimming, sometimes monthly during the growing season, to maintain their crisp lines.
To shape a hedge, keep the base slightly wider than the top, creating a tapered form. This allows sunlight to reach the lower branches, preventing them from becoming sparse or losing leaves. For overgrown or neglected plants, rejuvenation pruning can involve cutting branches back hard, sometimes to within 12 inches of the ground, to stimulate new growth from the base. When performing hard pruning, it can be done on one side of a hedge one year, and the other side the following year, to maintain some screening. Always remove dead, diseased, or damaged branches first, cutting them back to healthy wood.
Post-Pruning Care
After pruning, golden privet benefits from immediate care to support its recovery and encourage new growth. Adequate watering is important, especially after heavy pruning. Consistent moisture helps reduce stress on the plant.
Apply a balanced fertilizer in early spring following pruning to provide nutrients for new growth. Granular fertilizers can be worked into the soil around the plant, or liquid fertilizers can be applied with water. Applying a layer of mulch around the base helps retain soil moisture, regulate soil temperature, and suppress weeds. Cleaning up all pruned debris from around the plant is important to prevent pest infestations or disease spread.