It’s a Tuesday in February, forty degrees and drizzling. The crew truck pulls up on schedule. From inside, the garden looks finished for the year: the perennials have died back, the leaves are gone, the lawn has barely grown since November. The spireas are bare sticks. The rhododendrons look exactly the way they did last week.
You’re paying for this visit. What is there to do out there in February?
What does a landscape maintenance crew do in winter?
The same routine as the rest of the year, with pruning as the seasonal task. A garden that looks asleep still has work in it, and winter is when much of the pruning that shapes the next season gets done.
The routine on our properties doesn’t change by month: arrive on the scheduled day, mow and edge the lawns, weed and tidy the beds, do the seasonal task that’s due, then rake and blow everything clean. What changes is that seasonal task. In spring it’s fertilizer and weed control. In summer it’s keeping up with peak growth. In fall it’s raking and hauling leaves. In winter it’s pruning.
Some of the year’s work is already behind you by February. Leaf cleanup, irrigation winterization and fertilization come with the maintenance program; you won’t see them as extras. The irrigation was blown out before the first freeze, and the leaves went out in the fall.
So that Tuesday visit in the drizzle is mostly about the plants that look like bare sticks.
Why winter is pruning season, and why not for everything
Many deciduous shrubs and trees are easiest to prune while they’re dormant. With the leaves off, you can see every branch: what’s crossing, what’s dead, what’s growing into the path. The cut has the whole spring to close and push new growth.
That doesn’t mean everything gets cut in February. We schedule pruning by plant type, so each species is cut at the right time of year. The spireas and other shrubs that flower on new growth can be shaped now. The rhododendrons and other spring bloomers already carry this year’s flower buds; cut them in winter and you cut off April’s flowers. They wait until after they bloom.
That’s the difference between a crew that prunes and a crew that trims. Shearing every shrub on the same visit is faster and looks tidy for a week. Pruning on the plant’s own calendar is slower, and it’s the reason the garden flowers the way it should. We wrote about how to tell them apart in pruning vs shearing, and the timing plant by plant is in our guide to when to prune in the Pacific Northwest.
Our winter visit, then: the crew walks the beds, cuts the shrubs that are due, leaves the ones that aren’t, and clears the cuttings before it goes.
Routine pruning or specialty pruning: where the line sits
Routine pruning is part of regular visits: the common shrubs that have been pruned properly and just need keeping in shape. Specialty pruning is separate work, quoted as an Enhancement.
Specialty pruning covers small trees, large shrubs, restructuring a shrub that’s been sheared into a ball for years, and the species that need a specialist’s hand, like Japanese maples and fruit trees. Our enhancements or maintenance manager advises on the specifics for each plant, and the work is quoted before anyone starts.
Your maintenance scope is written down, and anything outside it is quoted separately as an enhancement. That’s what keeps the winter invoice from surprising you. If the crew notices the plum tree by the fence hasn’t been pruned in years, or the laurel along the drive is growing over the neighbor’s car, that becomes a recommendation and a written quote, not an extra line on the bill.
Winter is also when that kind of work tends to happen. Restructuring a sheared shrub, for example, is done in winter and staged over a few years, so the first cuts often go in during the same months as the routine pruning.
The same crew, reading the same garden
Each maintenance property keeps the same crew, so the people caring for your garden in March are the same ones there in November. In winter that matters more than it sounds.
Pruning is a memory job. The crew that cut back the spireas last winter knows how hard it was cut and how it responded. They know which rhododendron was left alone because it was still in bud, and which shrub along the walk is the one that keeps outgrowing its space. A rotating crew starts from zero every visit and is far more likely to shear everything to the same shape, because that’s the one thing you can do without knowing the plants.
The plan is written down too. Every garden we maintain has a written care plan, reviewed every year and adjusted when the garden needs it. Winter is a natural time for that review. Often the plan is just confirmed as still right; sometimes a bed has changed enough that it needs a new line.
A yard that’s mostly lawn has less to prune, and its winter visits are lighter. A planted garden is where winter visits do the most.
The garden in May, from that Tuesday in February
Remember the bare sticks and the rhododendrons that looked the same as last week.
By May, the spireas cut back in that drizzle are leafing out from the shape they were given, not sprawling into the path. The rhododendrons, left alone in February, are covered in the flowers they were already carrying. Nothing in the bed was sheared into a ball, because nothing needed to be.
That’s what the February visit was for. If you’d like your garden cared for on its own calendar, see how our landscape maintenance program works. For the full year of tasks, our Seattle landscape calendar goes month by month.