Forum home› Plants
This Forum will close on Wednesday 27 March, 2024. Please refer to the announcement on the Discussions page for further detail.

How to prune mature euphorbia mellifera

skbarker63skbarker63 Posts: 21
edited April 2020 in Plants
This plant is in my new garden and is getting very tall how can I reduce the height without damaging or killing it. How do I prune it.
It is about 7' tall by 6'wide
Thanks

Posts

  • Butterfly66Butterfly66 Posts: 970
    I don’t think you can shorten it as you will be cutting off the foliage and be left with stems that will die back. Usual advice is to cut down flowering stems to ground level in late summer/autumn after flowering. You may find you have some shorter stems which you could leave but if only a few it would look a bit straggly so may be best to just do the lot.
     If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”—Marcus Tullius Cicero
    East facing, top of a hill clay-loam, cultivated for centuries (7 years by me). Birmingham
  • DovefromaboveDovefromabove Posts: 88,147
    What a beauty that is!  <3

    I agree ... shortening it will just leave it looking like a bog brush ... it's a fairly tall plant. ... you can't change it's nature ... it flowers at the top of it's stems. 
    We cut back the stems that have flowered to ground level in late summer/early autumn.

    And you can take some cuttings 
    https://www.hardytropicals.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=131&t=20378


    Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.





  • FairygirlFairygirl Posts: 55,117
    You can just prune them back in spring. They grow back.
    Alternatively, if you can get in behind it, you could remove the rear part of it, right down to the base, which would leave 'the front' , instead of a complete gap. I can't see it well enough to tell if you have room to do that. You could also remove some of the stems, and leave others, which would lower it generally,  but again, it depends on how easily you can get at it. 

    Make sure you have proper protection though, because of the sap Euphorbias produce. 
    It's a place where beautiful isn't enough of a word....



    I live in west central Scotland - not where that photo is...
Sign In or Register to comment.