Many shrubs, some trees, and all tomatoes make suckers. Choosing to leave them or nip them can make a big difference in the health and beauty of the plant.

We may be most familiar with tomato plant suckers. They emerge between the main stem and a leaf joint. They grow quickly and make flowers. This may convince you to leave them with the hopes of getting a bumper crop. But soon all you have is suckers and flowers and suckers and flowers and then lots of green tomatoes.

By pinching off the suckers and letting fruit grow only off of the main stem you can get earlier, bigger, and ultimately more fruit. Staking the plants will help hold this neater version of plant and also get the fruit off the ground where molds and mice might prey on them.

Squash and pumpkins also produce suckers. I recommend picking a date, let’s say Aug. 20 or Sept. 1. On that date, start to pinch the tips off the vines. This pushes the plant’s effort into the fruits and ripens them sooner.

In the ornamental garden, roses, lilacs, crab apples, forsythias, and some other nursery trees and shrubs will make suckers. The tendency of Rosa rugosa to sucker makes it a good hedge rose. Syringa vulgaris or common lilac suckers profusely. For civilized plants, keep the suckers cut back to within a foot of the original plant. Otherwise, let it go for a hedge or thicket of lilacs. Flowering performance will decline if the shrubs are allowed to sucker too much. Remember that a sucker is taking the plant’s energy while taking years to flower on its own.

Crab apples sucker most often from below the graft point, so do regular apple trees. These suckers will be the variety of rootstock that the tree was grafted onto. The roots stocks are chosen for their vigor and if left uncontrolled may even rob the grafted variety of its life. Pruning these can be done anytime.

When you see a shrub suckering, you can decide to take one or more of these three measures:

1. Prune the suckers to the ground.

2. Leave the suckers to form a desired hedge.

3. Cut the suckers away from the plant early in the spring and plant them elsewhere to form new plants. (Except with crabapple suckers).

The tendency of a plant to sucker is a survival tool. Lop a tree off near the ground, and it will send up suckers that will eventually form a clump-like tree. The roots want to live.

Tomatoes don’t know that the season ends early in Maine. They are programmed to produce hundreds of thousands of seeds for next year’s seedlings. I once saw a tomato plant in Arizona that was over a year old. It was 15 feet tall, 10 feet wide, and had a trunk the size of my wrist. Having escaped the one or two frosts that whispered through town, it was in tomato heaven. It had been pruned, but to gigantic standards. Tomatoes still ripened in February.

If you do not exert your standards on some plants, they will assert their own. What will you do when the next sucker sprouts?

David Neufeld is a garden designer and stoneworker. He owns North Star Stoneworks.

rides herd on suckers at his garden in Sweden, Maine.