How do you prune to a bid, if there are no buds?

It is often said pruning should be done to a bud. On some shrubs the stems contain no apparent buds.

When you see such stems cut down to just a stub, where does next season's shoot come from? Does the existing stem die down and re-emerge, or does a wholly new shoot grow from the plant's crown?
If the former, how does a dead stem re-cultivate its self to a living one?

 

It depends on the species invovled, but some shrubs don't have obvious buds, but will have embryo buds just under the bark, after you cut back, when the sap starts rising in the spring these buds will erupt and start to grow. Sometimes too many will start growing, so some of these will need thinning out.

Usually these shoots appear from the stump near where the cut was made... but others can appear from nearer the base iof the plant,.

 

Thank you. Does that mean the shoots are independent of the original stem; or that the new shoots which grow "from where the cut was made" are in fact the cut stems re-growing?

If the former, what becomes of the cut stems? When you look at a rose, you do not see lots of stubs next to branches. Is this because the cut stubs die back and disappear?

 

SimonZ - you do seem to be thinking a lot about pruning!
Have you come accross the rose pruning experiment conducted I think by Gardening Which?
Years ago gardening books and TV programmes were full of detailed insructions about how to prune roses - cutting out thin and crossing branches, cutting just so far above a bud, always sloping back away from a bud etc etc
Someone decided to test this perceived wisdom with two identical rose beds, one was laboriously pruned 'by the book' and the other just had the tops taken off with a hedge trimmer.
Guess which bed flowered best the year after?
Yep - the one 'butchered' by the hedge trimmer!

The moral of the story could be....... don't worry too much about pruning - most plants have remarkable powers of recovery

 

hehehe
I can well believe it
Mefinks Mother Nature doesn't go around cutting just above a bud, sloping away from the bud etc etc

 

Many thanks for all your answers, which are very helpful. yes, I do think rather too much about pruning- but thsi is mainly because I am studying a course and far from just being able to perform the practicalities, I find myself both needing and wishing to absorb the wider science of the practise, even if, as demonstrated above, the old fashioned, simple methods are actually more effective than highbrow technicalities in some cases. I've always felt that plants in the wild behave differently and are hardier than garden plants, which is why they survive without careful pruning and so on.
Anyway, thanks alot.