Or 'Zen and the Art of Not Having your Handiwork with a Chainsaw Noticed'! I would almost combine this with Brandon's recently started thread, but 1) I'd planned it before I saw his 🤣 and 2) it doesn't necessarily overlap - in fact, in a way, it's oddly complementary.

I took advantage of the first warm day in what feels like forever yesterday to break out the chainsaw and do some winter pruning, before we return to another few days of frozen hellscape.

The things I worked on

1) My largest lacebark pine. Not sharing pics of this because it's hard to get w/o showing my neighbor's property behind it, and I value protecting their privacy as I hope they'd protect mine.

2) first time I've had to do major work on one of my larches. These lower branches were blocking my driveway. I'd clipped the ends of them back with loppers, but over time, that actually looks worse than this IMHO. It's inevitable that this kind of pruning, looks like a tree has been pruned.

3) My now huge Chilopsis on the SW corner of my house.

Just before the snow a month ago, I got one water sprout out of my Cedrus 'Shalimar'. I feel like it's likely to be the last time I have to find and remove one of them on this.

(In case I forget to or don't have time to finish my hardiness reports, 'Shalimar' was of course completely fine this winter, as you can see. But in my travels a week ago in the suburbs of Philly, I saw a smaller deodar cedar, maybe planted in the past 5 years, that was clearly burnt. Showing that inferior, less hardy seedlings of that tree continue to be sold in areas where they shouldn't! Thank you, greedy American wholesale plant industry.)

But for the Desert Willow, the Cedar, and the Lacebark pine, I realized that my final evaluative criteria for pruning is always would it look to an average person like it's been pruned?

If it doesn't, I feel like I've been doing the right thing! Key difference: have been doing, not "have done". If I'd put off doing anything to them before now, there would be no way for corrective pruning not to be noticed.

For all 3 of these plants, I've pruned them at least every other year for the past 5 to 10 years. And so, to relate this to Brandon's post - sure you can prune something right when it's planted. But the more important thing, in my opinion, is that consistently keep applying your vision to the plant over the years, so that it looks as good as it can.

In the case of the Cedar above, in particular, I can guarantee you if I hadn't started about 11 years ago, it would have the ugly (to me) appearance of multiple trunks. As it stands now, maybe an expert on C. d. would find the lack of lower branches slightly suspect. And yes, I feel like the most aggressive prune I made was the lower most, left branch, but it was shading out my precious (to me LOL) 'hardiest clone of Amaryllis belladonna' which is just on the left edge of this view. But I think, overall, a typical visitor to the garden sees this and thinks it mostly, naturally grew this way.

The only inversion of this rule in when you very deliberately want things to look non-natural (topiary) or stylized pseudo-natural (Japanese Niwaki)

What say thee?