Pruning A Cut Above the Rest
Have you ever wondered why most plants have a dominant shoot that rises higher above the others? It’s all about raging hormones. You can use this to your advantage if you want to modify the shape of a plant through pruning.
“Apical dominance” is the term scientists use to describe why plants reach for the sky. Apical dominance is the result of auxin (AWK-sin), a hormone that’s produced in the tips of plants’ growing shoots or at the high point of their stems. Auxin travels down each stem and sets off a chain reaction that puts the brakes, to some degree, on growth of side shoots, giving the uppermost growing point (the apical point) of the stem the upper hand in growth.
Side shoots mostly arise from buds along a stem, and whether a bud grows out into a shoot depends on how close the bud is to the source of auxin. The closer it is to the source, the greater its inhibition will be, although the exact degree of inhibition at a certain distance depends on the particular plant. ‘Mammoth Russian’ is a sunflower cultivar that grows as a single stem capped by a large flowering
