Clean the garden beds before winter: for or against?

"Should you, or should you not, clean the flower beds before winter?" This question is common and often asked at the end of autumn, as the festive season approaches, certainly to make the garden as presentable as the house! If it is the subject of an article, you will have guessed that the answer cannot be reduced to a simple "yes" or "no"!

Two very different types of gardeners

Among our clients who wonder, experience has allowed us to establish two main profiles of gardeners at the end of the season:

Profile 1: the pruning shear enthusiast, who prefers to cut back all the perennials and clean the flower beds before winter to get rid of the big spring chore right away.
Profile 2: the hibernating gardener who abandons the garden in favour of the sofa (and a good series on Netflix), thinking that if the garden needs cleaning, it’s better to do it in spring when the weather conditions will be better.

That said, let's remember that it is primarily the climate that determines the attitude to have in the garden before winter! So, let’s see what should be done in the garden beds for perennial plants, grasses, and for trees and bushes.

Should you prune perennial plants and grasses before winter?

The pruning of perennials before winter depends on the climate.

In a mild climate, cleaning the flower beds is recommended. Some plants continue to grow actively as long as temperatures remain positive. This is the case for Acanthus mollis in the Mediterranean zone, which continues to produce beautiful leaves. It is therefore possible to carry out light pruning and remove faded parts. We can also weed the flower beds to avoid competition in spring.

In a cold climate, plants enter dormancy to protect themselves from frost. Cutting all the stems before winter exposes their crown to the cold. It is better to keep some foliage, even dry, to insulate them naturally. However, you can prune echinaceas, rudbeckias, or monardas by removing faded inflorescences to prevent spontaneous seeding.

Winter flower bed, the plants are covered with a fine layer of frost.

In this flower bed, the faded stems are dressed in frost that sparkles at the first light of day.

Deciduous grasses such as miscanthus, pennisetums, or panicums provide beautiful structure to the garden in winter. Their dry stems protect the crown from frost and shelter biodiversity. It is preferable to wait until the end of winter to prune them, around February-March, when new shoots appear. In contrast, evergreen grasses, such as some stipas and fescues, which remain attractive all year round, can simply be hand-tipped to remove the dry blades.

Should you prune bushes before winter?

For trees and bushes, it’s a bit different: they cannot burrow underground to protect themselves; the wood that makes up their skeleton insulates them from the cold, so they are better equipped to withstand severe frosts and can therefore be pruned, but be careful: softwood species and pithy woods (poplar, willow, elder, hydrangea, etc.) do not tolerate winter pruning well, as water easily seeps into their soft wood and, under the action of frost, damages the pruned branches.

If pruning work can be done after the severe cold, it is imperative to protect fragile plants before winter, and for this, fallen leaves are the material of choice. 15 to 20 cm of fallen leaves at the base of a crown significantly increases a plant's resistance to cold.

To learn all about the different ways to protect your plants from the cold, check out this article: "The cold is coming, protect your plants".