How to Prune a Gold Mop Cypress the Right Way
Maintain the soft, weeping form of your Gold Mop Cypress with proper pruning. Learn the correct technique for selective cuts that ensure healthy, dense growth.
The Gold Mop Cypress, with its unique golden, thread-like foliage and weeping form, is a popular choice for adding year-round color to landscapes. While it is a relatively low-maintenance shrub, proper pruning is a practice that maintains its health, shape, and vibrant color.
When and Why to Prune Gold Mop Cypress
The ideal time for a significant pruning to shape or reduce the size of a Gold Mop Cypress is in late winter or early spring, just before new growth emerges. This timing allows the plant to recover quickly and for new growth to hide any pruning marks. Light trimming to remove stray, dead, or damaged branches can be done at any point during the year.
Pruning is primarily done to maintain the shrub’s natural mounded and weeping habit at a desirable size and to control its spread as it grows. Removing foliage that has browned from winter exposure also improves the plant’s overall appearance and encourages denser, healthier growth to fill in those spaces.
How to Prune Gold Mop Cypress
For effective pruning, you will need a clean, sharp pair of hand pruners or shears. It is important to disinfect the blades with rubbing alcohol before and after use to prevent the spread of any potential diseases from one plant to another.
The goal is to thin and shape the shrub selectively, rather than shearing it into a formal, unnatural shape like a ball. Shearing removes the soft, weeping tips that define the plant’s character. Instead, trace a branch you wish to shorten back into the shrub and make a cut just above a point where a side branch or new growth is present.
Gold Mop Cypress has a “dead zone” in its center where there is no foliage, and this woody interior will not produce new growth if cut. All pruning cuts must be made in areas that still have the thread-like yellow foliage to ensure the plant can regenerate.
Care After Pruning
Immediately after you finish pruning, it is good practice to clean up all the clippings from around the base of the shrub. Removing this debris improves air circulation and helps to prevent the development of fungal diseases that can thrive in decaying plant matter.
Watering the shrub thoroughly after pruning helps it recover from the stress of being cut and supports new growth. Monitor the soil over the next few weeks, ensuring it remains consistently moist but not waterlogged.
Unless your soil is known to be deficient in nutrients, it is not necessary to fertilize immediately after pruning. A heavy pruning may benefit from a light application of a balanced, slow-release fertilizer to support the coming flush of growth.