this is Jen with north coast gardening comm and I'm here today to show you how to prune a mock orange or Philadelphus now this guy is a fairly new one that's been in the ground about two years so all we're doing right now is training it a little bit so that it's got a nice habit now one of the things I want to do you'll notice it's developing a little bit of a leggy habit even though it's really green and fresh so I need to nip some of these tallest ones and just pinch them a little bit and what that does is it encourages all of these little latent buds that are where each of these leaves are encourages those latent buds to break so that when you pinch the tip like this it's going to come out with some growth from the side so you won't have this leggy habit you'll have it really filling in and becoming a nice shrub so just a little bit of pinching and they try and just keep keep an eye on overall size and shape of the shrub so that you don't end up with few Flyers that are way taller than everybody else so when you're pinching just go ahead and try and get every one of the tallest growth points because if you don't get all of them say for example if we left this instead of breaking down below on this instead of breaking out and starting some new growth down below it's just going to grow where it's easiest which is right up here at the growth tip so by making sure that you get every one of the little growth tips on your shrub you make sure that it's going to develop a really nice bushy habit for you in the future so every one of these little growth points and you can take it down one or two nodes or you can take it down a little bit more if you need to to get a good shape of your shrub right here now that's looking pretty good got you more to get now the other thing I noticed is when you're looking at the shrub it's a little bit off-balance and it's kind of laying on the ground over here down at the bottom so what I like to do is do is what we call skirting which is we pick up these these branches that are just laying on the ground and you just go ahead and take them out all the way occasionally they'll be attached to something else but usually it's something fairly small so this one right here it just looks like it's coming and it's going to be overwhelming this nice little acorus grass so I'm going to look and see we actually like this little branch and this is attached to this so I'm just going to take this one back right to where this branch is coming out and you don't have to worry too much these are a relative of the hydrangea so it's pretty easy to see where to prune to you can no prune to any one of these areas where you've got either a stem coming out or some leaves coming or these are not real fussy plants so I'm just going ahead and doing a little bit more skirting come around the back side of the plant here and you and then over here on the on this side now it looks like the front side here doing a little bit of that same thing where if I leave this go it's going to keep growing out and covering up this nice grass so I'm just going to prune out that little wimpy bit here and prove this back right here to this nice V to give it a little bit more of an encouragement to grow upwards rather than outwards and along the ground so this is Jen with north coast gardening comm showing you how to prune a mock Orange