How to To Prune a Hibiscus

Hi this is Yolanda Vanveen and in this segment we're going to talk about how to prune a hibiscus. I love my hibiscus plant that I got at the San Francisco garden show. Has all the sunset colors and it's just beautiful, I love it. But I found if I don't prune it, it just gets really lanky and doesn't produce as many flowers as I would like to have it produce. So by pruning it, you can make it become more of a circle size and not just some Medusa, and then you'll get more blooms in the end. So the best time to prune your hibiscus is throughout the growing season and in the fall when it's completely dormant. So as it blooms out, if you just cut the spent bloom right to the next bud, you want to leave it to the bud line. You just cut to the next bud, cut that part out and that will encourage the new growth to even grow more lush and you'll get larger and more beautiful flowers. And you can consistently just trim it down as soon as the flowers are spent just trim it down to the next bud line. And then in the fall, you will find that it will still get kind of lanky and once it's done blooming, especially if you live in a cold climate, what I've done is just trim it back to only one to two feet above the ground wherever the main branches are coming out, you don't want to trim it all the way back to wood because if there's no buds on it you won't get blooms the next year. So you want to just cut it back maybe one third the size and then I just keep it in the garage or the greenhouse for the winter and then just throw it back in the out in the sun in May the next year and it will bloom continuously the next year again. So as long as you keep it wet but not sitting in water, and you just trim out the old growth, you can enjoy your hibiscus almost year round.