Pink Muhly Grass is known for its stunning pink plumes and low-maintenance beauty—but when it comes to pruning, timing and technique matter. In this short video, our team explains how we approach pruning (or in some cases, not pruning) Pink Muhly Grasses to keep them healthy and vibrant year after year.
Here’s what you’ll learn:
- The best time of year to prune (and when to leave it alone)
- How over-pruning can impact bloom quality
- Our professional approach to maintaining ornamental grasses in large landscape settings
Whether you’re a homeowner or a property manager, these tips will help your muhly grasses thrive season after season.
Watch the video on YouTube, or check out the transcript below.
Want to know more about this plant? See our post on how to properly maintain pink muhly grass.
Read the Transcript
Hey everybody, my name is Jason Smith. I work for Bland Landscaping and today we’re going to talk about winter pruning of muhly grasses—and give you a little bit about muhlys in general.
This is a pink muhly. It’s in a three-gallon pot, so it’s still fairly young in its life. But size-wise (height and maybe width), that’s about what it’ll be when mature. It’ll just be a lot fuller, be a lot more leaf blades. They do bloom with these pink blooms towards the end of the summer, and that’s really their color for the year.
You won’t see this in the spring or the summer. It’s going to be August, September—maybe into October—you’ll see those. Pruning-wise, during the season, growing season, we don’t do anything to it. And then when we get into the winter months, we still don’t like to prune muhlys very much. They’ve become very sensitive. If we prune them down and we get into the plant crown, which is in the bottom here, it introduces them to cold weather or water getting in there and freezing. Then, we have winter kills. They won’t green back up in the summer or they’ll come back in chunks and just don’t look very healthy.
So, we really backed off of how we prune these—or don’t prune them at all. We would much prefer (in a commercial setting, which we operate in) to not prune these back and let them be as they are through the winter. If they do get a little messy and you have stuff falling off and making a mess, we may prune them back a little bit.
This is one that has been pruned. As we can see, we did not take very much off of it. We’ve only taken the seed head off the top, which would be maybe a quarter of it off the top. And we like to leave this on there to help protect the crown again, to help have survivability over the winter. Because, as mentioned, we have seen winter kill these in the cold temperatures when we prune them back heavy and leave the crown exposed.
If we’re in your neighborhoods or communities in January and February and you see us working on muhly grasses—or not working on muhly grasses—that is our typical practice. You could see one or the other in your community.