Planted Cotinus coggygria 'Grace' from Farmington Valley Nursery in spring 2011.
It's at the top of the driveway at the low stone wall.
It can be a very large shrub with huge plumy flowers, but I keep this cut back by coppicing it each winter, cutting it down to a foot high. I won't get blooms, but the form and the foliage will be beautiful. The leaves have a translucent look.
It is awkward looking until it leafs out in mid to late May with very eye catching deep red leaves.
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| 5/12/13 the new leaves are a bright red |
A month later it is shrubby, and the leaves are a softer, changeable color, depending on the light. It needs a second cut back at this stage (early to mid June) to keep it vertical and tidier. Cut back stems by a third.
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| 6/14/13 |
In fall the color is a deep purple wine red.
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| 11/1/13 |
Here's what the early spring cutback looks like -- although in 2017 I cut that middle stem down much more to encourage branching lower to the ground.
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4/3/14 before pruning 4/3/14 after cutting back 5/17/14 barely leafing out
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Once Memorial Day arrives, it becomes quite full and leafy, and beautifully red.
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5/31/14
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In summer it darkens, but still keeps the mixed jewel shades throughout.
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| 7/10/14 |
In summer resist the urge to pinch the wild branches if they have become overly-long stems; the resultant high-altitude side-branching will only look clunky. Instead, next year try being proactive.
If you pinch new smokebush stems in June -- or whenever they are still less than a foot high), you'll achieve denser, less floppy and bulky growth.
And you'd still retain the interesting thrusting verticality of its new stems, which have a casual but still organ-pipe-like effect.
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| 9/24/14 |
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| 5/20/16 |
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8/19/16 - I didn't do the second cutback in June when it was leafed out and about a foot high.
The result was a lot of long wild branches! |
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| 10/7/16 |
The foliage is always the draw for this big shrub, and it's easily seen coming up the driveway.
Louis Raymond says that cutting back to a framework of a few feet creates vertical shoots that are not as extremely wild and tall as cutting all the way to the ground creates. In any event cutting back does make the shrub regrow more vertical shoots. Leaving it alone will allow it to grow outwards.
I saw this one in 2011 at Mann's. I don't believe they are cutting theirs back each year, (no flowers have been sacrificed, it has smoky blooms), and it does seem to be wider and less vertical than what most smokebushes look like after coppicing each year.
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| June 18, 2011 at David & Sharon Mann's |
Nancy Ondra has a great tutorial here on
cutting back cotinus. and Louis Raymond goes into depth about
the procedure here.
