How And When To Prune Rosemary To Keep It Healthy Year After Year

Rosemary adds strong, earthy, pine-like flavor to chicken dishes, cocktails, and baked goods. Whether you cook with it or not, rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis) is a great addition to any garden. Its dark green or gray-green needle-like foliage adds evergreen color all year long in USDA Plant Hardiness Zones 8 and warmer, and in other areas, it can be overwintered indoors. Showy blue flowers attract hummingbirds and bees when they bloom in spring. Since it’s native to the Mediterranean region, it thrives in heat, sun, and dry weather. Don’t just plant rosemary and forget it, though. The more you harvest rosemary, the more growth it sends out, and a healthy plant can reach 6 feet in height. Pruning helps maintain its size and keeps it from turning woody. Read on for how to prune rosemary for thicker growth to help it thrive in your garden.

When To Prune Rosemary

Rosemary should be pruned at least once a year, and it may need pruning more often in warm climates where it grows quickly. It blooms in late spring to early summer in many areas. In warmer zones where it grows all winter, flowers may appear in October and last through March. The best time to prune rosemary is as soon as its blooms begin to fade in the spring or summer. Pruning will keep it from getting leggy and woody, producing fewer leaves, and it will encourage thicker, fuller growth. It may also give you a second bloom later in the season. You can use the cuttings to propagate more rosemary plants, dry the clippings, or use the trimmings as garnishes or in recipes.

New growth needs to harden off before cold weather arrives, so don’t prune rosemary within six to eight weeks of the area’s first hard frost. One last pruning at this time will help protect rosemary from cold and winter weather.

In late winter, as new growth begins, you can prune any winter damage or dead stems just above a section of the plant with healthy leaves.

How To Prune Rosemary

To prune, you’ll want to cut the plant back by a third, trimming only the green stems where new growth emerges. Don’t cut the woody stems because they won’t put out new growth. You can harvest fresh, tender rosemary throughout the growing season, which also encourages growth, but make sure to give it a thorough pruning early in the season. This is when you’ll cut the plant back to maintain shape and size, and remove any dead or damaged branches. Here’s how:

1. Use clean pruners to cut back overgrown branches that have shot up beyond the plant’s general shape.
2. Remove dead or damaged branches, and cut back any woody stems below the damage to a set of healthy leaves.
3. To reduce the plant’s height, cut taller branches back by a third. Make sure to cut each branch back to just above a set of leaves or nodes at a 45-degree angle. Work around the plant until it is the desired shape.
4. For any branches that weren’t cut during this process, snip off the tips of those branches above a leaf node to keep them growing.
5. Pruning can help shape young plants in their first year and help them grow faster. To prune young rosemary, wait until after it flowers and snip off the tips of each branch just above a leaf node. Young rosemary takes well to shaping, so now is the time to trim and shape it into a topiary or hedge if desired. The young tender stems are also perfect for propagating.