Appreciated for its beautiful, most often golden-yellow flowering, broom is a shrub that loves sun and lights up the garden from spring. Its small butterfly-shaped flowers are scented and display sunny colours, sometimes purple, pink, red, white and even bicoloured. Easy to maintain, hardy and drought-resistant, broom brightens gardens with its attractive coloured flowers from March to August depending on species. Used as an individual bush or in a hedge, it offers a compact, dense habit favoured by regular pruning. Discover our advice on pruning broom. 

Pruning a broom

Why pruning broom?

  • Pruning broom helps maintain the shrub a compact, well-balanced habit and prevents it from becoming bare. Regular annual pruning also promotes more abundant flowering.
  • Prostrate varieties need little or no pruning.

When to prune broom?

  • Pruning is carried out each year 1 to 2 months after flowering for spring-flowering brooms (until 10 June) and during winter dormancy in March before growth resumes for summer-flowering brooms.
  • If necessary, you can also cut back large brooms to a height of 40 cm above soil if they deform under weight of branches. This operation is performed in March. 
  • Moreover, if you use broom as a hedge, we recommend not pruning hedges between 15 March and 31 July to promote biodiversity and to avoid disturbing birds during nesting season.

How to prune brooms?

Technique

  • Use pruning shears well sharpened and disinfected with alcohol to avoid spreading disease
  • After flowering or in March depending on broom varieties, cut branch tips back by 15 to 30 cm to refresh the bush and prevent fruiting which exhausts the bush
Pruning broom
  • Remove dead and dry shoots while taking care to keep old lignified wood

How to cut back a broom?

  • To rejuvenate an old broom that needs it, cut all branches 10 to 15 cm above ground. You can also cut it back to ground level.
Pruning the broom
  • This operation allows new branches to regrow. Preferably carry out this pruning during dormant period (October to March) to avoid exhausting the bush. Also prune outside periods of frost and extreme heat.

Discover our advice on How to cut back a bush?

Tools

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