When Should You Prune Camellias Each Season?

In many of the most noteworthy southern gardens, there is a beautiful flowering shrub that stands alone as a prolific winter bloomer. The camellia is a unique and striking plant that goes its own way in the plant world. It keeps company with poinsettia and amaryllis by taking its blooming season during the winter months when most flowers have faded and taken refuge from the colder weather.

With their dark, glossy, evergreen leaves, camellias are a beautiful addition to any landscape. And when it comes to maintaining them, there is surprisingly little to worry about. They love a slightly acidic environment, well-drained soil, and light pruning just once per year.

When offered these courtesies, camellias will give you a very satisfying return on your effort. With these in mind, let’s discuss when to prune camellias in order to maximize the health of what is sure to become one of the highlights of your garden in winter!

The Long Answer

Every camellia gardener’s dream is to see a bountiful number of full and colorful blooms from their plants during those cooler months when flowers are difficult to come by.

While camellias can technically survive and will still show some flowers without pruning or much maintenance at all, a little goes a long way if you are hoping for the maximum number of flowers on your plant each blooming season.

The ideal time to prune a camellia is in the early to late spring, depending on the variety. Most Japonicas bloom through the winter months and into the spring, while Sasanquas will start to bloom earlier, in autumn, and bloom through the winter.

There are thousands of hybrid camellias as well. They all tend to bloom sometime in the late autumn and end by mid-spring.

Soft Spring Pruning

As long as you are keeping an eye on them, most camellias will let you know when they are ready to be pruned. The key is in observing the integrity of the blooms. Wait until the last flowers begin to fade and fall, sprinkling the ground below with their last bits of color.

This is the perfect time to prune. Pruning as soon as the blooming season is past will ensure the maximum amount of time for the plant to produce new buds. More buds, of course, means more flowers next winter.

Aside from those glorious blooms, another important reason to prune camellias (as if you needed one) is to allow sunlight and airflow into the interior of the plant. Camellias have those lovely, shiny, dark leaves, which make a beautiful backdrop all year long.

Things can get a little stuffy in there during those hot summer months, and that warmth and humidity is the perfect environment for insects to hide and funguses to multiply.

Creating some space in the interior of the plant will help stave off pests, funguses, and other diseases that will affect the lifespan and quality of the plant. Those inner branches and leaves will keep their lovely color and gloss if they get a little fresh air and sunshine as well.

Pruning Best Practices

With the memory of those last, lovely blooms fresh in mind, let’s discuss the best practices in pruning a camellia to maximize health and future flowering.

The First Few Years

A camellia shouldn’t need much pruning in its first four years. Pruning too early is a mistake that many inexperienced camellia gardeners often make. Camellias are slow growing and allowing them to grow unhindered for the first four years gives them the opportunity to establish a good, solid root system.

Pruning makes a plant more susceptible to disease initially, which is another reason to let your young camellia grow in its own way so that it can grow stronger before it needs to work on the process of healing pruning cuts.

Short of trimming off dead or damaged limbs, there is very little that needs to be done in a camellia’s first years. Deadheading, or plucking off the spent blooms during the blooming season is a good practice that will encourage and allow the plant to apply more energy to new blooms.

The only other pruning a young plant needs is, in the event that you want to achieve more of a tree shape than the shrubby form that camellias naturally take. If this is the case, trimming off some of the lower branches with a clean sharp tool will promote upward growth.

Soft Pruning Methods

Let’s dive into the methods of pruning a mature camellia. Once your camellia has adapted to and gotten comfortable in its surroundings it should get a yearly tidying up. Camellias generally should only be pruned once per year, in the spring, immediately after the blooming season.

Take a good look at your camellia and its surroundings. Camellias can grow quite large, especially some varieties of C. Japonica, which can grow up to 25ft or more over their lifetime. Camellias are long-living plants when well taken care of. It is not unusual, in fact, for a camellia to outlive the gardener who planted it.

Consider the balance of the plant and whether there are overgrown libs that could interfere with any structure it resides nearby. Do any exterior shaping by removing dead or diseased foliage, as well as any limbs that won’t fit with the landscape in the years to come.

Next thin out the inner branches with clean sharp tools. It is important to make clean cuts, as clean cuts heal faster, and cut back on the plant’s susceptibility to disease. Thinning allows for greater airflow and sunlight to reach the inner branches.

Camellias are susceptible to a handful of pests and diseases that like the warm, humid, density of the naturally growing foliage. Look for smaller, weaker branches growing from the interior, as well as any crossing branches. Trim these off as close to the trunk as possible.

Maintaining the Size and Shape

The last step in pruning a healthy camellia is to trim the ends of the blooming branches to encourage new growth. If you are happy with the size and shape of your camellia, after thinning out the interior and cleaning up any dead or diseased branches, you can maintain its size by removing around three inches from the ends of the branches.

This is about how much a camellia grows in one year. So by using this practice, you can keep a plant relatively the same shape and size.

If your objective is to grow your camellia larger, limit your trimming to the outermost inch of the flowering branches. As camellias grow slowly, and mainly during the summer, this will allow your plant to make some headway as well as produce the maximum number of flowers during the next blooming season.

Hard Pruning

There is, of course, the slightly more complicated practice of pruning a camellia that has overgrown its environment or has become leggy and lacking in density. Hard pruning is something that makes a lot of gardeners uncomfortable. Camellias, however, do quite well when cut back hard.

Much like their similarly acid-loving companion, the azalea, they will recover from a hard pruning by coming back denser and healthier in the long run. Although you will have to sacrifice some of your flowers in the next blooming season, (and possibly sacrifice them altogether). But rest assured, camellias are very resilient, and they actually do quite well with hard pruning when needed.

Hard Pruning Methods

The process of hard pruning a camellia is a two-step process and involves the only time a camellia should be pruned outside of the springtime. Most of your cutting will happen at the end of the blooming season, in keeping with the general guidelines.

You can cut a camellia’s branches back by half, even cutting the entire plant back to about 3 feet tall. It should recover and get back to flowering within two to three years.

The second phase of hard pruning takes place at the end of the summer growing season. By this point, your camellia should be sprouting lots of new growth. As much as it may pain you to take off any of that lovely new growth, this is an important step in giving your camellia the best shot at a full and healthy recovery.

This is the time to thin out some of the weaker new branches. This will give the stronger branches the nutrients they need to grow and strengthen through the winter.

Hard pruning is difficult. We don’t call it hard because it’s a joyful experience to take a cherished plant and cut it back to bare branches. But I assure you, it is worth the pain and will help your camellia to come back stronger and more beautiful than ever.