I would do it soon, before month end or before mid-July. I have not "tested" that with oakleafs but confirmed it with Macs by accident.

Several years ago, I lost 99% of all old-wood Mac flower buds one year when a friend, with my permission, pruned all the blooms... days before mid July.

I have not forgotten the experience of not getting flowers from old wood buds due to mid July pruning! If we assume that the oakleafs will do similarly, you should prune soon. Mother Nature likes to change the exact date every year!!!

Check how much sun it gets as some plants who get little sun like to stretch towards the light and become spindly and gangly in the process.

Luis

My Alice has the same problems. It's not large yet but the old stems are bare except for at the terminal ends. I'd highly suspect that the shorter you cut the old wood, the more likely the plant is to produce more new shoots from the ground. In that sense, it would not hurt to cut the old stems down some, even if they are still alive. And thus, next May or June you would delete those other old stems if they haven't produced any growth.

Thanks, you guys. I was just out looking at it and trimmed a couple more branches that I could get to and that I knew were dead. I live in OK and it's already hot here. I'm hesitant to cut it back now just because our climate is so challenging by this point. I may wait till Sept/early Oct, realizing that I may have no blooms at all next year. I did have it generally trimmed back this spring because it was so unwieldy and have yet to see a bloom, so this year may be a bust as well (but I knew that might be the case--old wood and all). I'm just glad that it's possible to cut it back hard if I need to. Proper pruning remains a mystery to me (despite my best efforts to learn about it) and, I suspect, a mystery to all but a very few, including landscaping people. I had my azaleas pruned this year after they bloomed, by people who swore they knew how to prune azaleas, and all they did was give them a crewcut--ridiculous.

H. quercifolia are also highly appealing to deer in the wintertime. The past two years, all the buds were eaten during this time or in early spring. It's to the point where I'll need to tie a net over the plant to keep them from biting it. I spray liquid fence year round but deer will take the smallest window to eat the buds when the repellent washes off.

A hosta grower I have visited uses a small electric fence about 12 inches off the ground to keep deer at bay from his 7,000 hosta plants. I asked him why don't the deer just step over it like we did? He said they don't see it and once they get zapped they stay away.