Holly BushesA Grower's Guide to Holly
Holly Care

How to Prune Holly Bushes

Holly is forgiving to prune, but timing matters if you want berries. Prune at the right moment and you shape the plant, encourage dense growth, and keep the winter fruit that makes holly worth growing.

How to Prune Holly Bushes

When to prune holly

The best time to prune most holly is late winter, while the plant is dormant and before spring growth begins. On evergreen hollies this is also when you can harvest berried branches for holiday greenery. Light shaping can be done in early summer after the new growth hardens, but avoid pruning in late summer or fall, which can force tender growth that winter will kill.

Berries come from timing: holly flowers in spring on the previous season's wood, and those flowers become the winter berries. Prune a female holly too late in spring and you cut off the developing fruit before it forms.

What you'll need

  • Sharp bypass pruners for stems up to about half an inch
  • Loppers or a pruning saw for older, thicker wood
  • Hedge shears (hand or powered) for formal holly hedges and topiary
  • Sturdy gloves — the spiny-leaved hollies bite

How to prune holly, step by step

  1. Remove dead, damaged, and crossing wood. Take out anything brown, broken, or rubbing back to healthy growth to open the plant up.
  2. Cut back to a bud or side branch. Make each cut just above an outward-facing bud or a healthy side shoot so regrowth heads in the right direction.
  3. Shape the outline. For a hedge or formal shape, shear the surface lightly and evenly; for a natural specimen, thin selectively rather than shearing.
  4. Renew an overgrown holly gradually. Holly tolerates hard pruning and resprouts from bare old wood, so a leggy plant can be cut back hard over one or two seasons to rebuild density.
  5. Keep the berried branches. On a female holly, save the cut stems with red berries — they are ideal for wreaths and arrangements.

Pruning holly hedges and topiary

Small-leaved hollies such as Japanese holly (Ilex crenata) and yaupon (Ilex vomitoria) take shearing better than any other type and are the classic choices for clipped hedges, low edging, and topiary. Large-leaved and spiny hollies are better pruned branch by branch to avoid cutting leaves in half, which looks ragged and browns at the edges.