Aucuba Through the Year: Seasonal Jobs and What to Leave Alone

Spring: the working season

Nearly every job on this shrub belongs to spring, and moving any of them to another season makes it harder. As the soil warms and before the new shoots extend, the plant has the whole growing season ahead of it to cover whatever you do, and the winter's damage is finally visible in full so you can deal with it in one pass.

Start by looking rather than cutting. Turn leaves over and check along the veins for scale before the population builds; note which side of the plant carries the winter's blackened margins, because that tells you whether wind or sun is the problem you are living with. Then cut: remove blackened and scorched leaves by cutting their stalks close to the stem, take out dead and crossing stems entirely, and shorten any overlong stem back to a leaf joint inside the canopy with pruners. If the plant is bare-legged, this is the moment for a hard renovation cut into old wood.

Spring is also when a female plant's flowers give you the information you need. Look at the flower heads and settle the sex question for each plant in the group: large branched heads full of pale pollen are male, shorter sparser heads with a small green ovary in each flower are female. Write it down once and you never have to work it out again.

Finish with mulch. Two inches (5 cm) of leaf mold or garden compost over the root area, kept an inch clear of the stems, is the whole of the plant's feeding for the year. Container plants get a balanced slow-release feed at the same time. Neither job is worth doing later.

Summer: water the young ones, watch the sun

Summer asks almost nothing of you on an established plant. No pruning, because a shrub stripped of leaves in heat struggles to recover, and no feeding after midsummer, because soft late growth will not firm up before the first windy freeze. What matters is water for young plants and vigilance about light.

Plants in their first two summers need a full can each week through dry weather, because they are competing for water against tree roots that were already there. Plants past that point can be left entirely alone; an established aucuba under a tree will go a whole dry summer on nothing and show little more than slightly dull leaves. Containers are the exception and need checking every few days in heat, watered until it runs from the base and then left until the top two inches are dry.

The thing to watch for is scorch appearing where there was none before. The sun tracks further round as the season progresses and a spot that was shaded in late spring can be in full afternoon light by high summer. If black blotches start on the leaves facing the light, put up a temporary screen now and plan to move the plant in autumn; do not wait for a second season of damage.

Late summer is the window for semi-ripe cuttings, once the year's growth has firmed but before it goes fully woody. It is also the moment for a second scale inspection, after the crawler stage has finished, to catch anything that survived the spring pass.

Autumn: berries, and hands off

On a pollinated female, autumn is when the plant earns its keep. The berries color from green through orange to scarlet, held in clusters against the dark evergreen foliage, and they stay on the shrub right through winter into the following spring. In a shaded corner in the dead of the year there is very little else doing anything at all, which is the whole argument for growing aucuba in the first place.

The only thing you need to know about this is not to cut it off. The autumn tidying urge arrives at exactly the wrong moment: prune now and you remove the berries as they color, leave fresh wounds going into cold weather with no season behind them, and gain nothing that a spring cut would not do better. Put the pruners away until spring.

What autumn does call for is drainage and shelter, checked before the weather turns. Clear fallen leaves that have packed around the base of the stems and would hold water there all winter. Make sure container drainage holes are genuinely open and lift pots onto feet so they are not standing in a saucer of rain. Stop feeding entirely and reduce watering as growth slows. If the plant is in an exposed spot, get the windbreak up now rather than in the middle of the first freeze.

Winter: the wind, not the thermometer

Aucuba is genuinely hardy, coming through around 5F (-15C) on an established plant in a sheltered position. That figure misleads people, though, because cold on its own is rarely what damages it. What damages aucuba in winter is cold dry wind stripping water from the big leathery leaves faster than cold or frozen roots can replace it. A plant at 15F (-9C) in a still sheltered corner comes through untouched; the same plant at the same temperature in a wind funnel blackens along every windward margin.

So deal with wind first and cold second. A plant in a sheltered corner needs nothing at all. A plant in an exposed position benefits far more from a temporary windbreak of mesh on stakes along the prevailing side than from any wrapping of the plant itself. Containers are the vulnerable case, because the root ball can freeze solid and then the leaves have no water source at all; move pots against a house wall and insulate the pot rather than the foliage.

Expect some winter leaf damage in a hard year and do nothing about it until spring. Blackened margins and drooping leaves after a freeze sometimes recover partially as the plant thaws, and cutting damaged growth off in midwinter only exposes the tissue behind it to the next cold spell. Wait until new growth shows you where the live wood ends, then cut back to it.

Keep three dates each year: when new growth starts to extend in spring, when the flowers open, and when the berries first color. Alongside a note of which plants are male and which female, those dates tell you more about how a given corner suits aucuba than any general hardiness rating.