How To Clean Up Tsukumo Cypress

A couple weeks back I did a post about cleaning up Junipers. In short, with a Juniper you cut any over-long shoots, pull off dangling shoots below the horizontal, and then pull off old shoots in the interior. But we shouldn’t pinch the living tips that remain.

Tsukumo Cypress is a good comparison tree. It looks similar, so you’d think the technique is the same, but it isn’t.

With a Tsukumo you do all the Juniper technique plus pinch the tops of the pads. This is truly a pinch-maintained tree.

Here’s our unworked tree. This is a big specimen—most Tsukumo are tiny, but this is a 2’ tree. And it’s shaggy, the perfect time to pinch it.

Tsukumo is best pinched when the shoots are 1”. It should be left alone until shoots are that long. Constant, nervous pinching of anything that grows outside the ideal shape ends with an exhausted tree. They have to grow.

Same set of pads after pinching. Much like the Juniper, the bottoms are cleaned up, and the interiors thinned, BUT, the tops of the Cypress pads are also pinched. (That would be naughty with a Juniper. Their usual reaction to this is to throw out juvenile foliage, which indicates annoyance.)

Long shoot ready for pinching.

Same shoot after pinching.

Very small tips may be pinched on Tsukumo.

Sometimes you see this after pinching—a white spike—which is wood exposed when the green stuff is stripped off. In this instance, the shoot is too thick and hardened off to pinch. It is better cut with a scissors.

Tsukumo after clean-up. Nothing else was done, so the clean-up has exposed the past work. A few improvements might be made in the branch placements. It needs a more significant back branch, for instance, to give it depth. Maybe something for another post.