🪴HOW TO & TIPS
Right. Pruning.
This is the topic where I see more plant parents freeze up than almost any other. There's something about taking a sharp pair of scissors to a living thing you've spent two years keeping alive that triggers a kind of paralysis. I get it. I was the same.
But here's the thing I want you to internalise before we go any further: a well-timed prune is one of the kindest things you can do for your plant. Not pruning isn't being gentle. It's being avoidant. Your fiddle leaf fig isn't quietly thanking you for leaving it untouched, it's just slowly getting leggier and more lopsided, like a teenager who refuses to get a haircut.
Spring is the moment. And here's exactly how I approach it.
Why spring (and not whenever you feel like it)
Plants prune themselves all the time in nature, just slowly. A leaf yellows, drops, gets recycled into the soil. What we're doing when we prune is speeding that process up and pointing the plant in a direction we want it to grow.
The reason spring works so well is simple: your plant is finally awake. Days are longer, light is stronger, indoor temperatures are creeping up, and your plant is essentially loading the cannon. When you make a cut now, the plant has the resources to respond. New growth appears within weeks instead of months. Wounds heal faster. Energy gets redirected into the parts you actually want to flourish.
Cut in autumn or winter and you're basically writing a cheque the plant can't cash.
The three reasons to pick up the snips
Before you make a single cut, get clear on which of these you're doing. They each call for slightly different techniques.
1. Removing the dead and dying. This is the easiest one and the one I'd recommend you start with if you've never pruned before. Brown leaves, snapped stems, crispy edges that have gone past the point of recovery. These bits are draining energy from the rest of the plant. Cut them off at the base of the leaf stem. Some plants, like dragon trees, will let dead leaves come away with a gentle pull, try that first before reaching for the shears.
2. Encouraging fuller, bushier growth. This is the one that intimidates people most, but it's also where the magic happens. If your rubber plant is a single tall stick or your pothos is one long, sad vine with leaves only at the tips, lateral pruning is the answer. You cut just above a node (more on that in a second) and the plant responds by sending out two new branches from that node instead of one. Suddenly your stick becomes a tree.
3. Shaping. This is the artistic one. You're not necessarily fixing a problem, you're sculpting. Maybe your monstera is leaning hard left because it's been chasing the light. Maybe your philodendron has one rogue vine doing its own thing. A few well-placed cuts and you've got a plant that looks intentional rather than feral.
The node: the single most important word in this newsletter
If you remember nothing else from today, remember this: always cut just above a node.
A node is the little bump or joint on a stem where a leaf meets it, or where you can see a small swelling. It's where dormant buds live, and it's where new growth will emerge from after you cut.
Cut too far above a node and you leave a stub of dead stem that often rots back down toward the node and invites disease. Cut too close to the node and you risk damaging the bud itself. Aim for about half a centimetre above. Close, but not touching.
This rule alone will transform your pruning results.
The one-third rule
Don't take more than a third of the plant in a single session.
I know it's tempting, especially if your plant has gotten really out of hand, to do a dramatic chop and start fresh. But leaves are how the plant makes food. Strip too many and you've got a plant that physically can't generate the energy to recover.
It'll sit there, stalled, and sometimes never bounce back at all.
If your plant genuinely needs a major overhaul, do it in stages across two or three months.
Tools matter more than you think
This is the one bit I'll keep short and direct: clean, sharp tools. Dull blades crush stems instead of slicing them, which is essentially creating a wound that takes weeks longer to heal and is wide open to fungal infection. For most softer-stemmed houseplants, a small pair of plant snips is plenty. For woodier plants like older rubber plants or ficus, you'll want bypass pruners.
What to do with the cuttings
Don't bin them! This is where pruning genuinely starts paying you back. Most healthy cuttings can be propagated. A cutting with at least one node, popped into water or a propagation mix, will often root within two to four weeks. You go from one plant to two (or five, or twenty) without spending a penny.
This is how my collection got out of hand. Don't say I didn't warn you.
The plants that don't really want pruning
A quick caveat: not every plant needs this. Succulents, most cacti, snake plants, and ZZ plants don't really respond to traditional pruning the way leafy plants do. With these, you're mostly just removing damaged growth at the base. Save your snips for the leafy lot.
I went deeper on a lot of this in a video, if you want to watch me actually do it on camera with a few different plants, I made a full pruning walkthrough here.