Pruning Plants without Encouraging Growth

Factual Questions
1

The title says it all; I’m familiar with some basics of plants.

Is there a way to prune/trim a plant without encouraging it to grow and divide? Like say I had a bush that had one end growing faster than the other and wanted to trim that side down for aesthetic purposes.

Sorry, this question is probably laughably simple.

2

For most plants, the growing tip releases hormonal signals that suppress branching. Therefore, if you prune plants, this does not encourage linear growth, but makes the plant bushier by encouraging side buds lower down on the pruned branch to develop into side branches…

3

you prune not looking for the end result but what will eventually become the end result.

you might need to prune farther back in distance and the number of branches to allow for the growth that you eventually want. if you are correcting uncontrolled growth this might be a multiple year project.

you might also prune asymmetrically if you don’t want something less desirable to look at; that is leave one portion of the plant uncorrected but green and leafy while you chop back another part to brown branches.

4

Taking off on what the others have said, the best strategy I’ve seen is to prune whole branches rather than the ends of branches.

For example, if you have a bush with branches like this:

You might be tempted to cut them all to the same length:

As has been said, this encourages them to bush out. Instead, cut whole branches off so you wind up with ones that have lengths you like:

These branches tend to keep growing without branching off. The branch that was cut completely off probably won’t grow because it’s so far inside the bush that it doesn’t get enough light to encourage growth.

5

I have a feeling the plant in question is going to naturally grow bigger and/or less evenly than the OP would prefer.

OP: do you have any idea what the plant is? Shrubs have differeng growth patterns from each other, so what might encourage bushiness in one type might not have as drastic of an effect on a different type.