How To Clean Up Juniper Foliage

You may find the soft “clouds” of mature juniper foliage pleasant.

Eventually this gets out of hand and we have a big thundercloud of foliage obliterating the structure of the tree. Which you may have spent a lot of effort wiring and setting.

At this juncture some retooling is in order.

This juniper has outgrown its shape and could use redefining. This is a mature tree, meaning it has no pointy shoots charging off, rather, all the growth is slow and from small tips.

First step, find the larger dangling shoots that are woody (brown at the base) and cut off with scissors. Maybe 10% of this redo was by scissors.

Next, use the fleshy part of your fingertips to PULL off the part of the shoot that dangles below the horizontal. Green shoots pull off easily. About 90% of this reset was by pulling.

A pad of foliage with shoots that dangle below the horizontal, which are small enough to be pulled off.

After pulling off the dangling shoots.

Now we’ll thin what remains. Open up the pad to find the older shoots. These are further back along the branchlets, and tend to look like the one on the left: still alive, but without growing tips. Pull off these inactive shoots. Shoots that look like the one on the right may remain, as they are bright green and growing. They are the future of the branch.

At the end of the rework, the tree has recovered the openness and clarity in the branch structure and twig structure. None of this was done by wiring or repositioning, just by trimming and pulling.

Larger, older shoots were cut off, with the smaller shoots pulled off leaving clean undersides and a thinner, more airy pad. Notice that no pinching of the remaining growing tips was done.

Depending on how fast the tree is growing, this sprucing up can be done once or twice a year.