Pruning Russian Sage
Tips On Pruning Russian Sage
Pruning Russian sage helps encourage the plant to grow in a more manageable and compact form and maintain the desired shape for the space and style of your garden. It is also necessary to keep your Russian Sage healthy and allows you to stagger the bloom intervals of the flowers so you can have bright colors all summer.
Pruning Russian sage also helps prevent the plant from becoming leggy. As the plant continues to grow and bloom, often the stems become longer while the buds and flowers become more spaced out on the stem. This gives the stem an unattractive and bare look. Also as these stems grow longer they can become heavy and flop over. This is not very attractive for the plant. Properly pruning your Russian sage can prevent this and help create depth for your garden as a whole, as well as protecting neighboring plants. The best time to prune a Russian sage is in late spring, after new growth can be easily seen and is about 4-6 inches long. Avoid too much pruning during this growing season as you will limit the number of blooms.
To begin, first go through your sage and remove any dying, diseased or sparse looking stems. It is also a good idea to dig out any suckers that may be forming along the ground to prevent overgrowth. Then get down into the base of the plant. Look for older, woody stems that are not blooming very much and remove them. This will create more growing space for new growth in center of the plant, resulting in a better looking and healthier plant.
Look at each stem, follow the shoots and buds down the stem, towards the base until you get to the 3rd or 4th shoot. This is where you want to make your stem cuts. Russian sage grows buds from last year’s growth, so you will want to cut back last spring’s growth to about 6-8 inches. This will encourage more shoots of new growth from the base making the entire plant bushier and more compact. When cutting the stems be sure to cut at a 45 degree angle using sharp blades to prevent crushing or splitting the stem. Always remove debris and dead stems that you have trimmed from the area to help prevent disease and mold from growing.
Once you trimmed the old growth out of the center of the plant to encourage more compact new growth and cut back the stems from last year to encourage more growth of blooming stems in early spring, you can perform a slight bit of pruning in early summer to help stagger the blooms. Once the growth from the stems you pruned earlier in the season has now reached about 18 inches, you can go along each stem and snip about 2 inches off the growing ends of alternating stems. This will ensure that while the untouched stems blooms are fading, the alternating snipped stems will begin blooming and your plant will be in color all season long.
Russian sage blooms are a wonderful blue lavender color and their slivery grey leaves create an overall attractive garden plant. These plants also help attract butterflies into your yard. They are hardy perennials that are drought-tolerant, disease resistant and are easy to care for. Pruning Russian sage will help prevent overgrowth and unattractive leggy growth and is a necessary step to caring for this plant. Other considerations are to plant your Russian sage in well-drained soil preferably with sand mixed in to prevent root rot and in full sunlight to help stop the plant from flopping over. This 3-4 foot tall plant makes a colorful and attractive border plant in the garden or stands well on its own.