There’s more to pruning trees than just removing hazards or improving the tree’s health and growth potential. Creative pruning choices can play a significant role in your landscaping and can help shape the look of your yard or garden by creating inviting pathways. Your trees can frame the path in aesthetically pleasing ways, providing shade and creating gentle boundaries. Working with the type, shape and placement of your trees gives you the opportunity to create a beautiful, sustainable and natural landscape.

Know Your Aesthetic

Have a clear idea of the kind of aesthetic you’d like to create before you begin. For example, you may want something that feels romantic, whimsical or contemporary. Each of these involves different approaches. Conveying a sense of romance or whimsy might involve a meandering pathway, while a more contemporary approach would use cleaner lines with straight pathways and sharp angles.

Planning

There are two main things to consider when it comes to combining tree pruning with creating a natural walkway. One is the shape and direction that the walkway itself will take. The other is the types of trees that you have to work with.

Not every type of tree is right for a project like this. For example, willow, pear, apple and beech trees are good candidates for creating arches. Some trees do not respond as well to pruning as others or are less flexible when it comes to shaping.

Consider Light

It’s important to think about how you want to use light. You might be charmed by the idea of a natural archway of branches overhead, but pay attention to whether it shuts out natural light. This isn’t necessarily something that you need to avoid, but you may want to alter your pruning plans if you’d like a lot of sunlight to fall on the path.

There are several different approaches you can use to increase the amount of light you’re getting. For example, depending on the height of the tree, you could reduce the entire crown instead of merely thinning it. You can also trim individual branches or only lower branches to get more light on the ground itself.

Other Pruning Techniques

If you hope to create a cool, shaded pathway, prune trees to form a canopy. Create arches by cutting beech trees so that their foliage makes a natural shape overhead, or weave willow or fruit tree branches together. The flexibility of willow and fruit trees also means that you can prune them into attractive shapes.

Designing focal points and other visual points of interest along a pathway isn’t always about adding wooden structures or decorative stone elements. With creative pruning, you can use the landscape itself to shape your walking path. If you live in Walled Lake, MI, reach out today to Adrian’s Tree Service for tree pruning services.