Gadenin日本語Get the appWinter: look at the structure, and put the saw away
The tree is bare and for the only time in the year you can see exactly how it is built. Walk around it, look for dead wood, broken limbs, branches rubbing each other and any narrow forks that might split, and tie soft markers on whatever needs to come out. Then leave it. Any cut made now cannot heal, sits open through the wettest and coldest weeks, and lands in the season when silver leaf and bacterial canker are at their most active.
This is the right time for planting and for moving a young tree, both done while dormant and both done when the ground is neither frozen nor waterlogged. It is also the time to check ties and stakes on young trees, loosening anything that has begun to bite and removing stakes on trees that have had two growing seasons.
Measure the length of last season's shoots on two or three branches while you can reach them easily, and write the figure down. That single number, tracked over years, is the best health indicator this tree gives.
If a branch breaks under snow or wind and is genuinely dangerous, make a rough safety cut and leave a long stub rather than cutting properly to the collar. You will tidy that stub in summer, when the tree can respond to the wound.
Spring: blossom, then the weeks of watching
The display comes and goes quickly, generally within one to two weeks, and wind and heavy rain shorten it. There is nothing to do to prolong it and nothing useful to spray. Note the date the first flowers open and the date the last petals fall; those two dates, kept for several years, become the most informative record you have of the tree.
As the leaves follow, start looking for the things that only spring reveals. A branch that stays bare while the rest leafs out is dead and something killed it. Amber gum seeping from sunken bark is bacterial canker. Silvery leaves on one branch are the first sign of silver leaf. In a wet flowering season some flowers will brown and hang on their spurs, which is blossom wilt and is far less serious than it appears.
Rootstock suckers appear from now on, low on the trunk or straight out of the ground nearby, and this is the moment to deal with them, while they are young and flexible enough to tear off cleanly at the base. Left until they are woody they have to be cut, and cutting brings them back.
Do not feed unless the tree has genuinely stalled, and if you feed at all, do it once now at half rate and never again later in the year. Do not prune anything, however tempting the structure looked in winter.
| Season | What to watch for | Action |
|---|---|---|
| Midwinter, fully dormant | Dead wood, crossing limbs, tight ties, rootbound stakes | Mark cuts, plant or move trees, remove old stakes, measure shoots |
| Flowering | Start and end dates of bloom | Record the dates; no work on the tree |
| Leaf out | Bare branches, gum on sunken bark, silvered leaves, suckers | Diagnose and mark; pull suckers; feed once only if stalled |
| Early summer | Blackfly on shoot tips, soil moisture on young trees | Hose off aphids on small trees, water trees under two years old |
| Mid to late summer, dry settled spell | The branches you marked in winter | The one pruning window; clean tools, small cuts, dry bark |
| Autumn leaf fall | Early leaf drop, mummified fruit, diseased leaves | Top up mulch, remove diseased debris from site |
Summer: water young trees, and take the one pruning window
Established cherries need no routine watering. Trees in their first two years do: a thorough soak once or twice a week in warm dry weather, enough to wet the whole root zone each time. In a drought of three weeks or more, give even an established tree under about ten years old one long slow soak at the canopy edge and then leave it alone for a fortnight.
Mid to late summer, once the season's growth has hardened, is the only time to prune a flowering cherry. Wait for a run of dry days with dry bark and no rain forecast, disinfect your tools, and cut only what you marked in winter: dead, damaged, diseased and rubbing wood. Cut to the collar, keep the wounds under about two inches (5 cm), leave them unsealed, and stop as soon as the necessary work is done. If the weather refuses to give you a dry window, postpone to next year; nothing here is urgent.
This is also when to cut out anything you diagnosed in spring, taking silver leaf or canker back at least six inches (15 cm) into clean pale wood and disinfecting the blade between every cut. Take the prunings off site.
Watch the leaves through the hottest weeks. Early yellowing and leaf drop in late summer is drought stress, and it matters more than it looks, because next spring's flower buds are being formed right now. A tree that runs dry in late summer flowers poorly the following year.
Do not do anything to the ground under a cherry in summer, or in any other season. No forking, no digging a border in, no laying a path, no stacking materials on the root area. Root damage done now shows up as crown dieback one to three years later, long after anyone remembers the cause.
Autumn: mulch, tidy the right things, and stop
After leaf fall, top up the mulch over the root area to two or three inches (5 to 8 cm) of composted bark or garden compost, spread out at least to the width of the canopy and kept a couple of inches clear of the trunk. This is the most valuable single job of the year and it replaces feeding entirely on most trees.
If the tree had blossom wilt or bad shot hole, rake up the fallen leaves and remove any shriveled mummified fruit still hanging in the branches, and take that material off site rather than composting it under the tree. On a clean tree, fallen leaves can simply be left or covered with the mulch.
Note the date the leaves fall, and whether the tree dropped early. Compared against the same date in previous years, an early leaf fall usually means a dry summer or root trouble, and it is a warning about next spring's flowering.
Do not prune, do not feed, and do not water an established tree from now until the following summer. Autumn is when leaf scars offer bacterial canker an easy entry, and it is exactly the wrong time to add wounds of your own.
The short record that answers next year's questions
Five entries a year cover this tree completely: the first and last day of flowering, the date of leaf fall, the length of the year's shoots measured in winter, the date and size of any pruning cut with the weather that day, and a line for anything done anywhere near the root area.
That last one is the entry people skip and later need most. Crown dieback arrives one to three seasons after roots are cut or compacted, by which time nobody remembers that the path went in two summers ago or that a load of gravel sat on the lawn for a month. Written down, the connection is obvious.
Taken together those notes let you answer the questions that come up every year. Was the blossom short because of the weather or because the tree is weakening? Is the flowering getting later? Was the crown always this thin? A cherry changes slowly enough that memory is genuinely unreliable across a decade, and five lines a year is not.