Photo Credit: Karolina Grabowska via www.pexels.com

Gardening is one of life’s small joys: dominion over your little patch of paradise, meditation in the form of care for your plants, shrubs and trees, and pleasure in the work done to keep your garden happy and healthy. Pruning your garden’s trees is one such gardening task, which can be far more crucial to your trees’ health than may initially seem. Rather than shaping a fully-grown tree, active pruning of grown and growing trees alike can correct growth irregularities, guide growth in a manner friendly to your garden and ensure healthy and disease-free growth all the while. Of course, pruning is a destructive process, and as such it is important to remain mindful of the wildlife that call your garden home. Here are some ways in which you can embark on tree-pruning endeavours safely, and protect wildlife in the process.

When Best to Prune

The wildlife you are most likely to affect in pruning your trees are bird, who take to nesting in tree branches. The nesting season for the vast majority of birds is between February and August, representing a period of active nest-building and habitation. Any tree-pruning activities should be done outside of this window, in the winter – this way, less birds are likely to be affected by your removal efforts. An additional benefit can be found in the dormancy of deciduous trees in winter; their bare branches allow you an easy line-of-sight into the tree, so you can verify there are no active nests present before you begin to remove branches.

Monitoring Wildlife

Inspecting your trees for signs of settled life is an activity you can undertake year-round, and indeed should. Understanding which trees in your garden harbour life at any given time can give you a unique window into understanding your garden as a habitat. Bringing out your pruning saw in the summer months can be a perfectly safe endeavour in this way, if you read the settlement and migration patterns of the birds that live in your garden properly – and, of course, provided you can make certain the trees you are treating are free of life at the time of pruning.

Accommodating Wildlife

You can also have a more active hand in the nesting habits of animals that visit your garden. Introducing bird-houses and nesting boxes to quieter corners of your garden can encourage wildlife to make safer homes there, away from their natural predators. Not only are you preserving your garden’s ecosystem, but also limiting your impact on nesting animals when you take to treating your garden’s trees. You could also encourage the growth of relevant prey to birds that call your garden home, in order to keep them healthy; leaving an area of your garden unmanaged can provide a great environment for pests to proliferation, which birds can then feed on.