Pruning Espalier - Greenspire Lindens - February 2026

With the weather warming up this past weekend, I was able to get out and do a tiny bit of dormant pruning around the garden.  I started with one of the two Greenspire Lindens that are planted near the house, along the south fence line.  They're currently trained into a four-tier horizontal cordon espalier and each season they show A TON of top growth that needs to be pruned back in late Winter.  

Over the years, I've learned (just a little bit) about the best way to handle some of this task and I've modified how I've approached the task.  Some years, I take more off the limbs, some years less.  I seem to have settled on leaving limbs with two buds and cutting back the rest.  

I posted some thoughts on these trees just two weeks ago and showed the current state of them with all their 2025 top-growth.  In that post, I talked about how I pruned them back in March 2025 and said that I wanted to get them done earlier.  Good news, Jake.  You sort-of did.  At least half-of-them.

As I said...I've learned a little bit about these trees and how they respond, so I wanted to push them a little bit more this year.  But, I'm hedging my bet.  I decided to be VERY aggressive with the pruning of just one of them - the one on the left.  And, a little bit easier with the one on the right.  

Here, below, is a before and after of the hard pruning:

Next, I'll move on to cleaning up the one on the right before the weather warms up too much.