When should a magnolia (saucer and star) be pruned?
Prune right after bloom in late spring and keep it light — cut in late winter or early spring and it bleeds sap heavily, cut in early fall and the new growth will not harden before frost. The species trap is that magnolias compartmentalize wounds poorly and set next spring's flower buds during summer, so a tidy-up pruning in July or August removes the entire following bloom and opens wounds that never properly close.
Reading magnolia (saucer and star) before you cut
Frost-blackened flowers and buds are an annual cosmetic event, not decline; the tree leafs out normally afterward. Real decline is thin undersized leaves, early yellowing, dieback progressing from branch tips inward, and on the undersides of twigs the shiny wax-covered bumps of magnolia scale — the largest scale insect in North America at up to half an inch — with black sooty mold on the foliage below. Sunscald cracking on the southwest face of the thin smooth grey trunk is the other quiet killer here, and unlike scale it is not treatable.
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