The many shapes a forsythia can take Do you really want to prune that harbinger of spring into a meatball?

Traveling with the family to western Massachusetts this past week offered a view of the advance of spring in rapid motion. As we crossed the bridge into New Hampshire, Marjorie and I looked down over the tops of trees unfurling new leaves and thought simultaneously of Robert Frost’s poem, “Nothing Gold Can Stay.”

“Nature’s first green is gold,” I quoted.

“Great minds think alike,” she replied.

Beneath the soft and subtle golds of willow and oak, the bright yellow of forsythia was everywhere. I believe Massachusetts must be offering tax breaks to homeowners who grow this herald of early spring, for few properties are without at least one shrub, and some residents compete with the highway department for the largest colony.

Early in the trip, we decided to document the many forms that forsythia assumes in home landscapes. We photographed wild and woolly hedges that had not been pruned in decades, slender flowering branches twisting into the light from a tangle of old, woody stems. Other informal hedges, open and airy and far more floriferous, reflected the care of annual pruning. And there were all of the tortured forms, meatballs lined up along the property line, hot-air balloons flanking the entrance drive, and flat-topped plants that might be used as garden benches.

For my taste, the best forsythias are those managed to enhance their natural growth habit, slender branches that grow upward and outward, stiffly arching down to earth under the weight of spring flowers. This can be accomplished with a single plant, a small grouping, or a long informal hedge.

Forsythia flower buds form during the summer on 2-year-old branches that grow off of older branches or from ground level. As a branch grows old, its flowering is reduced and plants with an abundance of old branches thicker than an inch in diameter often bear few flowers. Also, shearing plants into unnatural forms removes many flowering stems and shortens the length of others, thus reducing the total number of flowers.

The gardener’s task is to enhance the proportion of young, floriferous branches, and this can be accomplished with a three-year cycle of pruning. Each spring, as soon as the plants stop flowering, prune one-third of the branches, choosing the oldest and thickest. Cut each branch back to the ground or to within a few inches of the ground, varying the height of the cuts to maintain a natural form. Make each above-ground cut just above an outward facing bud.

New stems will then grow from lateral buds. These stems will grow vigorously during their first year and flower profusely in their second and third years.

While pruning each plant, you should also remove any dead, damaged or diseased stems, again making each cut either just above an outward-facing bud or at ground level. Pruning for these “three d’s” should be done throughout the year, whenever they are noticed.

Pruning forsythias, even informal hedges, should be done with hand-pruners, loppers and a small pruning saw. Under no circumstances should any form of pruning shears be used! Shears lop off stems at indiscriminant points – you want to make each cut just above an outward facing bud.

Forcing forsythias, or any other plant, into unnatural shapes, is plant butchery. A formal hedge with a flat top and sides that slope gently outward to the ground is about as unnatural for forsythia as you can get. So are meatballs and hot-air balloons.

Send queries to Gardening Questions, P.O. Box 418, Ellsworth 04605, or to reesermanley@ptc-me.net. Include name, address and telephone number.