My take on whether or not summer pruning will be dwarfing is that if you actually substantially reduce the amount of light harvested you will reduce growth. If on the other hand you simply remove surplus harvesting capability, essentially reducing shading and enhancing efficiency, no dwarfing will occur.Sometimes I bring trees in and shrink their range but I would assume that this would be about equally dwarfing whether done winter of summer- at least in the long run. That's because the ability to harvest that light is not recovered whether branches are pruned winter or summer.One interesting question to me is where harvested energy goes, based on whether the wood is fruiting or vegetative. Obviously spur leaves are going to send much more energy to fruit production then to new wood (the basis of vigor). Trees start to slow down once they start bearing fruit but I used to think that annual wood (their leaves, actually) sent more energy to the roots (as well as to new wood) then spur-wood. Ferree's research seems to contradict this assumption as his moderate summer pruning leaves spurs alone and only removes vegetative wood. I believe that anything that sends more energy to the roots will increase a tree's vigor.
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