When should a siberian elm be pruned?
There is no pruning schedule that redeems a Siberian elm — by the time anyone looks, most are already a mass of included-bark unions and old sprout regrowth. If you're keeping one, realistic maintenance is dormant-season weight reduction over the target plus removal of dead and crossing wood; topping it, which people do constantly, produces a dense head of weakly attached sprouts that fails harder in the next storm than the original limbs did.
Reading siberian elm before you cut
Siberian elm is far more resistant to Dutch elm disease than American elm, so it rarely dies dramatically — it degrades. Look for bacterial wetwood weeping slime flux down the trunk, cankers, dead tops, and elm leaf beetle skeletonizing the foliage brown by midsummer; by the time a Siberian elm looks bad, the wood is generally already compromised where it matters structurally.
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