Bring spring indoors with flowering branches

This is a great time of year for pruning — my favorite gardening task — and for bringing branches inside to flower in your home.

Branches with interesting foliage and flowering branches can both be forced indoors. You’ll want to prune branches that are not essential to the plant’s basic shape or save branches from your winter pruning to do this.

Branches should be at least 1 foot long, full of fat flower buds, and cut on a day when the temperature is above freezing. Cut the ends at an angle and put your branches in water in a cool room out of direct sunlight; when the buds color up or the foliage starts to unfurl, arrange them in a vase and display them — still in a cool spot, and without direct sun.

Good choices for forcing this month include serviceberry (Amelanchier), magnolia (Magnolia), flowering quince (Chaenomeles), forsythia (Forsythia), crabapple or apple (Malus), flowering pear (Pyrus), flowering cherry (Prunus), spring-flowering witch hazel (Hamamelis vernalis), and redbud (Cercis).

Consider saving some branches from pruning shrubs to use for pea staking in your perennial border or pots this year. Your best bet will be twiggy branches with lots of small stems. The base should have a single stem that you can insert in the soil around whichever perennials need support; your perennials will grow through the branches, giving them a support structure. Use larger branches to support Annabelle hydrangeas, which tend to flop over as they begin blooming.

Raspberries can grow into a tangled mess and produce poorly if they’re not pruned properly. Go ahead and prune fall-fruiting raspberries (with fruit between August and October) back to the ground now to produce one crop of fruit. Most fall-fruiting varieties are primocanes that produce fruit in their first year of growth. Cut the old canes as close to the ground as possible so that buds will break from below the surface of the soil. New canes will grow and set fruit later in the year. If old canes aren’t cut low enough, they might form fruiting laterals, and these won’t be as healthy.

Summer-fruiting raspberry varieties are usually floricanes that fruit in the second year of growth, so make sure you research the right pruning technique.

• Tim Johnson is director of horticulture at Chicago Botanic Garden, chicagobotanic.org.