"Brooklyn1" Gravesend1 wrote in message
...
On Thu, 21 Jul 2011 15:46:21 +1000, "FarmI" ask@itshall be given
wrote:

"Chris" wrote in message
...
Hi folks

I totally neglected my butterfly bush last year. Now I have beautiful
blooms, and I look forward to a gazillion Monarchs soon (I am right on
their east coast migration path) but I also have a bunch of dead
stalks from last year. Can I prune them off now? Should I wait till
Fall? Advice needed, thanks all!

After flowering is a rough guideline for pruning plants, but if you decide
to do an immediate trim whenever it needs doing (or indeed whenever you
think of it), you won't do any major damage to any plant I can think of.
Don't prune now, but do an intermediate trim now :-))

Removing dead parts of a plant is not pruning. Dead portions of any
plant need to be removed immediately. Pruning is the removal of live
portions of a plant (for various reasons), and for that there is an
appropriate time/method.

Yawn.