You can prune it back about as hard as you like. And no worries about flowering next season! I love the foliage color of 'Magic Carpet', especially as it pushes new growth, but I really dislike the rather insipid pink color of the flowers. So I would prune off all the flower buds as soon as they emerged.........which they continued to do throughout the season!!

If you anticipate winter damage, I'd wait until spring and you start seeing some foliage budding before pruning. In my climate where winter is not really much of threat, I'd prune now or as soon as the leaves fall off.

They will grow to full size again within about 6 weeks of a spring hard pruning IME. I posted some photos of pruning my spireas this spring following winter damage. They bloomed this summer, but I don't know if all spireas will do that.

yes.. i would do it in spring.. no use to trigger active new growth in late fall ...

and next time you get winter damage.. jut cut out all the dead ....

ken

I'm with you Gardengal. I have taken out almost all of my Spirea (they just crisp all summer) but I have one 'Magic Carpet' left and I cut the flower buds off. You are kind to call the color 'insipid'. I call it bilious!

LOL!! Anything that produces Pepto Bismol pink flowers has little place in my garden! I even hunt out the white flowered bergenia and dicentras which I vastly prefer over any of the pink selections. I'm just not a very pink kinda gal!!

I put up with the spirea as I really like the foliage colors it went through and the constant removal/shearing back of the flowers buds forced it to produce the very brightly colored new foliage all season long.

I hate pink also. The only pink-blooming flowers that I allow are Rosa 'Clair Matin', which is one of my very few roses. The flowers are what I call 'seashell pink' - a pink with no blue in it. And the sepals and new stems are cocoa brown. Really lovely. Sorry OP, got off on a tangent...

I would rejuvenation prune, then continue shearing when it gets back to the size you want.

No need to rejuvenate prune this; it's a very low-growing shrub and you can practically run over Spirea with a lawn mower and it will come back.

But a lawn mower doesn't make clean cuts!

It won't matter!

I've pruned my Froebelli and Gold Mound Spireas to about 6" from the ground and they bounce back just fine. I wouldn't think Magic Carpet would respond any differently.

I agree that they are very tough plants. Mine catch the blowing oak leaves and need serious grooming in very early spring. I remove any dead branches then too. Since this needs to be done early so as not to cut off too much of the beautiful new growth, and they are not a plus in the winter landscape, I wonder if I should/ could just cut them way back in the fall. I am in zone 6a.

When I cut mine back, I usually cut them back in the spring (April). Since spireas bloom on new growth it doesn't reduce bloom production. This coming spring I'm not going to cut them back but just remove any dead branches and rake out all the leaves. (Yes, my spireas are leaf traps too.)

Why aren't you going to cut them back, samsarah? I skipped it one spring and it just got big and raggedy. Not a cute little thing at all.

Because I planted only them two years ago, and they are not filling in like I was hoping they would by cutting them back. My mom has a spirea, and we didn't cut it back at all, and it is filling in very nicely. So, I thought next spring I wouldn't cut it back to see if it fills in eany better than when I do.

Bowl haircut actually works well with these things. But eventually, you will want to get in there and do some renewal pruning too, taking out dead and old stems. Just doing the bowl haircut, you eventually end up with a congested mess of dead and senescent stems in there. So eventually you will want to deal with that too.