The act of trimming a plant

Usage examples of pruning.

The grass was as close-cropped and carpet-like as some old English lawn and the trees themselves showed evidence of careful pruning to a uniform height of about fifteen feet from the ground, so that as one turned his glance in any direction the forest had the appearance at a little distance of a vast, high-ceiled chamber.

Strict measures against disorder, a powerful armed force, even a pruning of the oligarchic class and the dispensing of their territories to the poor.

Sometimes, as if from long-standing habit, he would take his sharp, heavy sheers out of his overcoat pocket and painstakingly, without asking any money, set to work in the yard in front of the main building, trimming the thuja bushes, pruning the acacias, and weeding the garden beds.

Preening and pruning himself effulgendy and strutting vaingloriously about the platform as he picked up momentum, he gave the men the colors of the day again and shifted nimbly into a rousing pep talk on the importance of the bridge at Avignon to the war effort and the obligation of each man on the mission to place love of country above love of life.

While what I am to describe to you comes to fruition, I shall play the part of a serene old man, far removed from influence, weary indeed of a surfeit of it, an old countryman who seems mainly interested in the system devised on these umber hills by my neighbor Columella and by the freedman Sthenus for the abundant cultivation of grapes, and in the capital they will say that Seneca is at one of his villas writing tragedies, pruning vines, taking cold baths in all weathers at the age of sixty-two, and sending homiletic epistles to his friend Lucilius Junior, who, poor fellow, is already all too amply instructed by his wordy friend.

A local physician, untrained as a surgeon, created an operating table by propping a door across two pews, then sawed limbs off men as though he were pruning trees.

In the high-roofed, brightly lit growing-chamber, warm and humid, the women were at work plucking the unwanted flowers from the greenleaf plants and pruning the tendrils of the velvetberry vines.

In many pure spruce forests the larger trees have been able to withstand the pruning influences and remain limby, while the smaller ones, being pushed in height growth to reach sufficient light for survival, have cleared themselves with remarkable rapidity.

However, through drastic pruning, Spur had managed to bring three Macouns and one Sunset apple, and a Northstar cherry back into production again.

Carlson rejoiced over the carnage that ensued, though a strict Malthusian might have considered it as a long-overdue pruning.

She stabbed and hacked with a poleax that had replaced her pruning hook, her eyes narrowed with grim determination.

After pruning his programs and memories and then encoding them as an intense tachyon pulse, he set loose the zero-point energies of the spacetime within his great brain and exploded himself into the pieces of flotsam that Danlo had discovered orbiting the Star of Ede.

But he could not wholly free his programs from the Other, and so he repeated this pruning of himself many times.

Never look up from pruning her roses and find him smiling down at her from the terrace.

At the next of the greenish-purple ch'hala trees down the line, occasionally visible through the crowd, an MN-2E maintenance droid was carefully pruning away dead leaves.