Hedging my bets #2

So having established that I have the wildlife habitat equivalent of the Mona Lisa around my garden and if I so much as touch it I shall have the wrath of a thousand hairy-bearded environmentalists raging about my head, I have had to work out how it is possible to garden alongside my hedge.

Just after a puny hedgetrimmer had been at it: not a shred of difference did it make (the tops were done with a flail: now that's more like it, but a little impractical inside the garden as the tractor wouldn't fit)

I have been weighing up a few options:

1. Rip the whole thing out and replace it with a wall.
Social suicide. I could never lift my head in polite society, and certainly not in the village, ever again. People have been sent to the Tower for less.

2. Rip the whole thing out and replace it with another hedge.
There is a precedent for this in the village: someone down the road from us has clearly ripped out their hedgerow and replaced it with a sort of cotoneaster sort of thing. It looks horrible: the essence of suburbia dropped like an alien into a rural idyll.

I have a lovely memory of the beautiful beech hedge I planted around my old house: but again, such clipped refinement would sit oddly among the wildness, and besides, it took years to establish, during which time the cows who live next door would have a high old time skipping around among my cabbages.

The inside of my hedge. Now in the process of returning to its former occupation as the outside of my hedge.

3. Make it a bit smaller.
Ah: now you're talking more sense. The main point of conflict between me and my hedge is that it's taking up too much of the garden. This is especially the case in my very thin vegetable garden: when you've only got about 20ft to play with anyway, an 8ft hedge either side reduces the available growing space to a wide path.

When you look more closely at the actual structure of the hedge, it's quite obvious that it's escaped from its original boundaries. The hump of chalk bank which my hedges stand on is hidden behind a forest of suckers: mainly hazel, but an awful lot of bramble and some blackthorn, too. There's a good few years' growth there in fact, and I got to thinking if this were a shrub, I'd be pitying it for being so neglected and working out how to renovate it back to its original shape.

In fact if you start thinking like that, you remember (something I bang on about quite a lot) that hedges are still plants. They need feeding, watering and weeding just like your other garden plants: and in this case, they also require rejuvenating.

So that's what I've been doing: it is a herculean task, involving a lot of heavy action with the loppers and pruning saw, and a pile of green waste which has just passed my head height across about two car's lengths of garden.

But I am uncovering a better hedge: a well-behaved hedge, one which is a bit gappy at the moment (despite still being about 4ft across) but looks as if it will this season have enough light and room to regenerate with new wood and fresh growth.

Looking back down the garden at the bit I just did: the darker area marks the original footprint of the hedge. As you can see, it is transforming the space: and, though it looks a bit rough at the moment, I hope it will transform the health of the hedge as well.

I get four feet of extra space each side of the garden, and my grassy path of a veg plot is transformed into something that looks like you might be able to grow something in it.

I don't think my Grade I listed hedges will ever be low-maintenance; but all the best things take care and love and attention to keep them at their best. And besides, I like to garden my hedges. The nice thing is that now I can garden in between them, too.

GOOPs February

Notes to self:

1) In winter, branches on apple trees are full of water and therefore VERY heavy.
2) You know that little cut you do on the underside of the branch to prevent it falling and stripping away a load of bark on the way? You do that FIRST, even if you think it might be slightly in the wrong place so you'd better just do a little cut in the top first to make sure you're going to line the two up.
3) When you ignore the two points above, the following happens:

• you slice through around, oh, let's say 10cm of the top of the branch
• you suddenly realise that previously stout branch is inexplicably moving away from you
• there's a sort of creaking noise and the sound of splintering wood
• your chicken run fence disappears under half a tree that's now lying on the ground
• because you failed to make the underside cut first the branch takes with it a massive strip of bark and you have revealed yourself to be crap at pruning trees.

My final weekend finishing off the apple tree pruning didn't go as well as I'd hoped. Fortunately I'd made this rubbish cut halfway along the branch so I could get rid of the top weight before making a neater cut closer to the tree - you see I do know the theory, I just don't always follow it - so I was able to cut away most of the shockingly big tear, but there's still quite a bit left and I feel the tree is reproaching me every time I look at it now.

This post is inspired by GOOPs - Gardening Oops, a meme probably dreamt up especially for me as it encourages us gardeners to stop taking ourselves so seriously and more to the point 'fess up that we're not all as perfect as we'd like everyone to think we are. So thanks Joene over in Connecticut - lesson in humility duly learned!

Ouch

There's one thing they don't tell you about gardening before you start: you only find out once you're well and truly hooked and it's too late. It can be, and almost always is, excruciatingly painful.

Most of the time it's true that we all spend our time wafting about in floaty Laura Ashley dresses and floppy hats (except, in public at least, if we happen to be male gardeners) with trugs overflowing with floral bouquets on our arms exclaiming over plant combinations and quoting poetry at each other.

But it is also undeniably true that I'm almost always bleeding, bruised or aching - sometimes all three - from some gardening-related wound or other.

At the moment it's a blister. And not just any blister: a huge gobstopper of a blister, right slap bang in the middle of my left palm.

Now for any normal person, this would be an odd place to have a blister. On the curve of your thumb, maybe, if you'd been, say, rowing or painting a ceiling; or if you were a particularly keen letter-writer you might develop a carbuncle on your top middle finger joint just where the pen rests. But in the middle of your palm?

Seasoned gardeners will know all about this pecularly November-related affliction, and will probably sympathise. I've been planting tulip bulbs. Hundreds of them (well, 350, to be exact, which isn't a lot by some people's standards but is quite enough by mine). And that spot where the end of the trowel rests as you gouge a 4" hole in the earth over and over again is, you guessed it, right in the middle of your palm.

I've been planting my tulips in bursts so when the central-palm blister got just too painful I decided to transfer over to my hand-held bulb planter, not usually my favoured option as I find it a bit heavy-duty for my purposes, but at least its sturdy wooden handle would lie across the 20p-sized wound on my palm in, I hoped, a soothingly non-abrasive way.

I didn't reckon on the action the sides of the bulb planter would have on each side of my hand where I twisted it into the ground. I now have two more blisters to match: one on the outside of my palm, just where your clenched fist would rest on the table; and the other just on that fleshy bit between thumb and forefinger.

I have to return to my bulb-planting tomorrow for one last push: I'm seriously considering attaching a spike to my foot. But then I'll end up with blisters on the soles of my feet, too.

I won't mention the rose thorns semi-permanently embedded in my fingers (I've lost some of them - where do they go, do you think?) or the barbed-wire lacerations which stripe my arms from January to March and again from about July until September (pruning season). I've even found berberis thorns sticking out of my head. And that's not even counting the sundry rashes, broken nails, skinned knuckles, stone-bruised knees, groaning backs or aching shoulders I've sustained in the course of pursuing the gentle art of growing things.

Actually, I find whenever I get together with other gardeners we almost always end up comparing wounds at some point with a sort of childish fascination. I had a great time earlier this year when I was sporting a livid gash about 6" long on my upper arm. It elicited horrified admiration from all around, who assumed I'd slashed myself with a chainsaw or other viciously sharp pruning implement and only just avoided severing my entire arm.

Unfortunately for my gardening cred, it was actually an oven burn, sustained while reaching across a scalding hot baking tray to get something from the cupboard. But don't tell anyone. It makes a great scar.

A tale of gardening failure

My poor apple trees.

I was raking up the leaves they've so generously been scattering all over my chicken run, and to relieve the monotony (and the ache in my shoulders) decided to have a closer look at them - something I don't do nearly often enough.

I found them etched with a sorry tale of years of callous neglect from their excuse for a gardener. I'm afraid that since they are in the chicken run, they're something of an afterthought at the end of the garden and I don't pay them anything like as much attention as I should: the constant and tender cares of better orchard-owners than I are sadly lacking here, and though they try to soldier on as best they can, they're clearly showing signs of strain.

It doesn't help that the person who planted them - not me, I hasten to add - put them far too close together: I have four standard apple trees, two Bramleys, two Cox's, about 10ft apart in a square. That's about half the room they should have, so they're at a disadvantage before you even factor in the slacker gardener who's supposed to be looking after them.

Here, like a doom-laden encyclopaedia entry of afflictions for apple trees, is what I discovered:

1. Woolly aphid

Like cotton wool balls sticking to the bark. There are little critters under there, sucking away joyously at the sap of my apple tree. I've seen this covering an entire tree in someone else's garden, so it can get to epidemic proportions: luckily I've only got the odd fluffball or two.

Treatment: I'll be getting out the hose with the spray set to 'jet' this spring: you just zap the suckers away and keep doing it till they're gone. Very satisfying.

2. Brown rot

Actually I did know I had this problem - I just haven't done anything about it. The apples go disgustingly brown and pustulent while still on the tree, and then - key to identification, this - they stay there, mummified. If you leave them, they'll infect healthy apples next year.

Treatment: do the exact opposite of me and pick them off as soon as you see them. Get rid of them in the bin, or burn them: don't put them on the compost heap.

3. Squirrel damage

This suspiciously regular area of bark damage is characteristic of a visit from one of those furry-tailed rats we're all supposed to find so sweet. As you can see, it's eaten away the bark right around the branch, cutting off the water and food and killing the branch. Still think they're cute?

Treatment: Letting rip with air rifles is, for some inexplicable reason, frowned upon in our semi-suburban street. The dog is, uncharacteristically, some help here: though the main purpose of wildlife in his opinion is to provide him with merry chasing opportunities, he does share our opinion of squirrels and they're the one and only thing on which he occasionally sates his inner wolf. However, he's also a bit thick so they outwit him all too easily and laugh their squirrelly laugh at him from on high. I think this is one bit of damage I'm just going to have to put up with.

4. Canker?

I really hope I'm wrong here, but it's not looking good. Apologies for the lousy picture, but I was in a state of shock when I was taking it.

Canker is the one thing apple growers fear to see. Sunken patches of bark like this, where the branch above the patch has died back (as was the case here) is a sign of a fungal disease that can kill the entire tree if you let it spread.

Now, before panic sets in, I'm not entirely sure this is canker. It's a bit long and thin - cankers on apple trees tend to be rounder, like the horrific picture on the RHS advisory service page on the subject (now there's a sight to strike fear into an apple tree's heart). On the other hand, there's no denying that there has been considerable die-back above the area.

Treatment: I can feel an extensive programme of winter pruning coming on. The organic way of dealing with canker is simply to cut it out: and if this is canker, it's very much at the early stages, with only small branches affected and nothing on the trunks or major branches - so I've still got a chance to get rid of it if I act now. I'll be cutting back at least a foot or so behind the canker into healthy wood, and again - I'll be burning the wood, not leaving it lying around to re-infect healthy areas. And even if it isn't canker, I'll have given my languishing apple trees the first TLC they've had in oooh..... this many years.

And then I shall assuage my guilt by pampering them in an over-compensating sort of way all year. Before lapsing next winter some time into my usual state of distracted forgetfulness, of course.

I think I shall go and become an accountant now. Goodbye.

Inspiration from West Dean #3

If you thought training fruit was a simple matter of arranging the branches in a sort of fan-shape against a wall, think again.

You can trim them into single stems - cordons - trimming off all the side shoots to encourage fruiting spurs from the main stem only. If you've heard of espaliers and fan-training, you've probably heard of cordons. The advantage to this is you get to pack about five varieties into a ten-foot space. You can grow cordons upright (though you get less fruit I believe) - like this:

And it doesn't have to be apples: this is a redcurrant ('Redstart') trained as a double-cordon.

And if you want to know what a double cordon is - here you go. You just allow that single stem to branch, once: doesn't take up much more space and doubles your yield.

You can train them along a fence into a hedge...


...or over an arch to make a tunnel.

Or if you're feeling really ambitious, you can build a sort of free-standing cage and train your fruit up that. Here's one they made earlier...

... and here's another one with a pointy top.

I'm a bit sceptical about cage training - can't see how you'd keep the air circulating around the centre of the fruit tree, and if you can't do that it's a recipe for fungal disease - but I'm willing to be convinced, and it sure does look pretty.

Thank you once again to Jim Buckland, Sarah Wain and the team at West Dean Gardens, near Chichester, for playing around experimenting and showing us all we don't necessarily have to do it like that.

The bamboo boogie

You may already know that I'm no fan of bamboo.

The trouble with urging people to dig up all their bamboo and throw it on the nearest bonfire is that if you happen to be the gardener, you're the one who gets to dig it up. And if you've ever tried to dig up even the smallest hawser-like root of a bamboo you'll know this is The Job From Hell.

Since I have a number of clients who have bamboo in their gardens - and therefore require me to do something about it - it quickly became time for some rapid backtracking.

So while I still won't have the stuff anywhere near my own garden and am seriously tempted to pour petrol - or at least a little well-aimed glyphosate - on pots of bamboo waiting for sale to unsuspecting customers at various garden centres across the land, if it's already in your garden there's only one way to go: Proper Maintenance.

The trouble is, bamboo is generally touted as a low-maintenance or even no-maintenance plant. Even if you're going to be wilfully blind to its thuggish habits, if you don't spend at least a little time each year sprucing them up a bit they end up looking like this:

This is a Phyllostachys nigra in the back garden of one of my clients which has never been touched, like most of the ones I come across. As you can see, it doesn't just behave like a thug - it looks like one too.

So - you take out the thinnest of the canes, right down to the ground, leaving just the nice thick well-coloured ones. Then you remove the suckers migrating out from the main clump, as ruthlessly as possible, followed by those annoying canes that flop out to the side too much. After that, trim down the tops to the height you want - in this case there was only one stem that needed shortening as for some reason known only to itself it had headed skywards and left all the others behind. After all that, you end up with something like this:

Actually I think I overdid it a bit on removing the arching branches - this is a little upright for my liking, though I'm not sure I had much of a choice really. But anyway, it'll start leaning outwards again soon (the overriding principle of bamboo is to revert to the most troublesome way of growing at the earliest possible opportunity). The client and I also agreed that this is a bamboo in desperate need of some company (there used to be a swimming pool on that circle).

But what we both loved - and the whole point of the exercise - is this:

Aren't they lovely? Strong, slim, elegant canes of near-black, and you can actually see them now. Not only did I remove the messy ones in between, I also stripped away the leaves up to about a third of the way up. Now, that's a bamboo I can see the point of growing.

Wrestling wisteria

Look what I took on this week...

Actually I shouldn't have taken it on at all, being as I'm hopelessly overloaded with work already, but when you're offered the chance to garden at a 16th-century house which happens to contain the village museum, and it's got a wisteria on the front that's at least 60 years old, probably older, then I ask you - how can you possibly resist?

The owner told me she hadn't been able to see out of her bedroom windows for a while, and I'll admit to being a little nervous.

Four hours later... this is how it looked. In the end it wasn't too difficult, just time-consuming: I worked my way along all those main branches and took back every side shoot to about 2-3 buds, though I went easy on those which were obviously about to flower so the owner would have a little bit to look forward to this spring. As I said to her, once I've given it its summer pruning too, it'll be back under control, and with luck and a following wind, it'll be smothered in flowers next year. And she'll be able to see out of her windows, too!

Summer-pruning roses

About this time I find all my roses, and everyone else's too, are getting a bit wayward.

They've mostly finished flowering, bar a few late flushes, and they suddenly start shooting great thick stems skywards in a bid to take over the world. This is a Good Thing on the whole, as it means they're very healthy and well-established, and you should be able to look forward to a nice handsome display next year.

However - if they're anything like the 'Perpetually Yours' climbers on the fence between me and my neighbour, they can become a serious hazard. This summer while my back was turned they shot up several massive stems above the fence, a good 6ft long, which began waving about spectacularly in the recent gales threatening to whip off the heads of sundry children and household pets passing by.

'Perpetually Yours', incidentally, is a lovely rose covered in froths of pretty frou-frou noisette flowers in palest yellow. I have two, which took a while to establish in my sandy acid soil, but which are now spectacular each summer. Their only real shortcoming is that they don't stand up to weather very well, dissolving into soggy brown soup in heavy rain, like many roses I've found - a problem strangely unmentioned in the brochures. Mind you, the tried-and-tested favourites - 'New Dawn' and 'Dublin Bay' in my garden - seem to escape this problem.

But I digress. The point is, everyone talks about pruning roses in late spring (or late winter, if you're me) but nobody mentions that they need summer pruning, too. This time of year I end up picking thorns out of my fingers yet again, tying in wayward stems and cutting out any heading in the wrong direction.

I also cut back those long flowered stems by about a third - some of this has been done already in deadheading (which I'm intolerably bad at getting around to, though it doesn't seem to make much difference to the number of flowers I get) but there are always some which still flap about. This summer pruning will to some degree restrict growth, as all summer pruning does - but it's sometimes no bad thing to give roses a rap on the knuckles when they're getting too full of the joys of summer. Just don't do it any later in the season, as new growth will get knocked back by frost if it hasn't had the chance to harden off in time.

Scary gardening

I got called a scary gardener the other day. That was by a client of mine when she saw what I'd done to her forsythia.

The trouble is, I keep getting asked to put right the effects of years of neglect. This inevitably means reducing large, overcongested shrubs to a fraction of their original size and density.

This is of course very good for the shrub: you cut out all the dead wood that's been suffocating it for so long, you let air and light into the centre from where it'll send up lots of lovely new young shoots (especially now it has room to do so), and particularly in the case of this forsythia, you restore some of the natural shape to the plant. The forsythia in question had been given a haircut once a year for several decades, which involved clipping the top to a blobby kind of dome shape and cutting off a large proportion of next year's flowers in the process. The centre of the shrub was so congested you couldn't see between the branches, and it had also more or less stopped flowering.

In my defence, I had intended to go quite easy on it - forsythia don't normally enjoy being very hard pruned, so I usually only remove a couple of the thickest branches. But in this case the decision was made for me: once I got up close and personal with the centre of the shrub, I discovered that at least half of it was dead. Once I'd removed that, there was a bloomin' great hole in the middle, so in the end the only live branches I had to remove were to re-balance the shrub again.

Result: a much healthier, but much reduced forsythia. The owner came out to see what I'd been up to, and gasped.

"Oh... my.... god.... " she croaked, for some reason clutching her throat.

At this point I began stumbling over myself in my haste to reassure her that it would be much happier now, produce lots more flowers next year, would actually move in the wind rather than just sitting there in an approximation of rigor mortis... etc etc etc. Whereupon she called me a scary gardener.

Well... I shall be suitably smug next April and May when it's smothered in tons of yellow flowers. Honestly, it's a good thing I don't require any thanks for this job....

Pruning as art

I'm well into the March pruning season now - have so far tackled dogwoods, coppiced eucalyptus, hebes, mahonias, hydrangeas, buddlejas and an overgrown berberis (that one was as truly horrible a job as it gets). I have yet to take the secateurs to a deciduous ceanothus or two, a cotinus, a small field of hypericum, and several pyracantha. I'm sure I'll spot a few more before I'm done.

It took me quite a while to realise that pruning is an art form (and I'm not talking about the really arty stuff like cloud pruning or topiary - just common or garden keeping your shrubs in check pruning). One injudicious snip and the balance of a shrub is ruined - usually if you chop off a branch you weren't intending to you actually end up starting again, as you then have to re-balance the shrub to make amends for your mistake.

So when I'm pruning I take my time. I do an awful lot of standing back and pondering with my head on one side, à la van Gogh (told you it was an art form). This is because once you prune out one big-ish branch, if you take a step back and look at the whole shrub, it suddenly becomes glaringly obvious which branch is now sticking out like a sore thumb and needs to be pruned out as well. Eventually - hopefully - you get to an equilibrium, where all the branches are evenly spaced, there's plenty of air and light in the centre of the shrub, it's not too tall or too wide, and looks just right (if considerably slimmer than when you started).

Of course there are shrubs which provide a little light relief to all this nailbiting judgement malarky - cornus, buddleja and coppiced eucalyptus you can just gaily slash back to a bud somewhere between 6" - 36" above ground level with no thought to aesthetic delicacies. But treat all shrubs with such reckless abandon - as, I find, most white van gardeners do - and you end up with a stubby stump of brushwood which does no aesthetic favours to anyone and won't help the health of the shrub, either. Take three, or even four times as long over doing it, and you'll have not a pruned shrub, but a work of art. It's a creative business, this gardening lark.

Rambling on

I'm coming to the end of the rose-pruning season at the moment and thank goodness for that - my fingers are full of thorns and my hands are so scratched it looks like I've been washing in barbed wire.

I'm ending the pruning season with a really tricky one, though: in my new garden, there's an old and rather dilapidated trellis fence across the back supporting three climbing roses - or are they rambling roses? That's the problem. The owner knows what one of them is - it's Albertine, which is a rambler, so that's fine. The other two are a mystery, and they're not the same as each other, either.

The difference between a climber and a rambler is quite a subtle one, but has quite an impact on how you look after them. As a general rule of thumb, if your rose is producing lots of whippy stems from at or near the ground, it's almost certainly a rambler: if you can see a framework of branches in the centre, from which the flowering shoots are coming, then you've got a climber.

Of course, there are, as always, exceptions to the rule, and I think I may have one here. The rose on the left-hand side is producing lots of long, whippy stems - but it also has quite an established framework. Now this could be because it's been quite neglected, so the whippy branches have been allowed to thicken more than they usually would - or it could just be a whippy sort of climber.

Oh dear... well, I hedged my bets and pruned it like a climber but leaving more of the whippy bits in than I usually would just in case it's a rambler after all. I shall wait until it flowers and take a sample or two up to Wisley just to find out for sure.

Oh yes, and the difference between caring for ramblers vs caring for climbers? You prune climbers at this time of year, taking sideshoots back to 2-3 buds from the central framework, but ramblers you allow to... well... ramble until August, when you remove one in three of the oldest shoots right down to the ground to thin them out a bit. Climbers, you see, flower on growth made this year; ramblers flower on growth that's matured from previous years. Which is why I'll be in deep doo-doo if I've pruned a rambler like a climber - because I'll have chopped out all those nice mature stems, and therefore the flowers... Well, time will tell, and luckily the owner is very understanding!

Back to work

At last - the sun is shining, the frost has stopped (for the time being at least) and I can get outside again. I realised this morning that what with a combination of bad weather and Christmas, I only gardened one week in December... that must be some sort of record for me.

One thing I did do in my own garden - which didn't require treading on the frosted grass, which at one point didn't defrost for five days in a row - was to sort out my willow tree. This is the goat willow (Salix caprea) that's by my pond - you can see another picture of it covered rather fetchingly in snow here. You might be able to see from the earlier picture that it was overhanging the fence quite considerably - well on the other side of the fence happens to be my cut flower garden, so it was quite urgent that I take out the overhanging branches and let in a bit more light.

The depths of winter are a great time for pruning trees - you can really see what you're doing, and create a good, balanced outline. You can also get a good look at the general health of the branches, and those which are crossing other branches or generally growing in the wrong direction become very obvious when they're not hidden by leaves. In this case, I aimed for quite a tall, upright shape which was well-balanced but didn't cast too wide a shadow.

When pruning trees, you need to take care not to cut too close to the trunk. If you look at where a side branch leaves the main branch or trunk, you'll see there's an obvious junction. This is called the collar - it appears as a slight swelling between trunk and branch. You should cut on the branch side of the collar - not through it, or on the other side of it, as it contains lots of good hormones which promote the rapid healing of the wound. You can see where I've done this on the big cut facing you in the picture.

It's a good idea too to cut quite close to the collar, as if you leave too much of the branch on the tree, it'll die back and could rot and let in disease - I could have cut fractionally closer here, in fact, and it's not always easy to get it absolutely right. One tip is to cut away the branch little by little, from the far end back towards the trunk, so you get several chances to cut it to exactly the right point.

On the vine

Ornamental grapevines are among the loveliest climbers you can plant. There's something so luxurious about those sculptural leaves draping themselves elegantly over balconies or walls. The grapes themselves aren't much to write home about: they're edible, but quite "pippy" so a novelty rather than a delicacy. But if you choose one of the ones with spectacular autumn colour, like Brandt, you'll be rewarded with wine-dark leaves which glow in low sunshine before tumbling to the floor to be used, pressed flat, in children's autumn collages.

One of my clients has a (non-specific variety) grapevine trained around a double patio window at the back of her house, which is a lovely way of using them as it frames the otherwise rather harsh contours of the window quite nicely. I was out pruning it yesterday: another of the lovely things about grapevines is that they're simplicity itself to prune (I'm talking here about ornamental pruning, where you're not so fussed about the size of your grapes - edible grape pruning is a science in itself, and though I plan to master it some day, it won't be today.)

This is one of the few pruning tasks which you have to complete at the right time. Leave it till much after Christmas and the sap will start rising again - meaning every cut you make will bleed profusely, weakening the plant badly and in a bad case even killing it. I try to prune ornamental grapevines in early December, though it can slip till the end of January in a cold year and you'll be fine.

Then you just work your way along each main stem and take back sideshoots to 2-3 buds. And... er... that's it! You can tip out the main stem too if it's grown as big as you want it (just take it back to about 3" before where last year's brown wood changes to this year's green new growth). It's so satisfying, and the grapevine looks very sculptural after you've finished - if you're feeling festive, hang some baubles or tinsel off it for an instant outdoor Christmas decoration!

Keeping trees in check

I spent a happy hour or two with the chainsaw the other day, converting an ill-advised pollard into a coppice in a client's garden.

The difference between pollarding and coppicing is pretty straightforward, though people tend to get a bit confused in a "stalactites and stalagmites" sort of way. Pollarding is when you allow the tree to develop a single trunk, and then when it's got to the height you want, you cut the leader to that point and allow it to grow new shoots from there. It's good if you want to limit the height of a tree yet allow it to provide some screening too.

Another client has a row of pollarded lime trees growing right the way along the length of her garden: very elegant, and with a little judicious pruning of the inevitable wispy sideshoots that sprout from the trunk from time to time, it's easy to keep them good-looking all year round. Willow also makes a good pollard: a local willow producer grows pollarded willows all along the streams in the field behind his house and harvests the stems each winter for use in basket-weaving.

It doesn't work for all trees, though. The client I visited the other day had tried to pollard a hazel tree, which doesn't lend itself to the process well at all. Hazels sprout like crazy from all up the trunk and from the base as well as soon as you try to limit their growth, meaning you quickly get not an elegant column but more of a bizarre upright hedge effect. In this particular case, the client had allowed one or two of these shoots to develop and pollarded those too, so you ended up with a multi-stemmed pollard, complete with wild beardy clumps on the trunks, if you can imagine such a thing: not a pretty sight.

With hazels it's much better to exploit the naturally multi-stemmed habit and coppice them. This involves cutting the whole tree down to about 6" above ground, which looks drastic, but then next spring it produces a lovely spray of even, whippy shoots to the same height all round, giving a shapely shrub-like effect. You allow this to grow on for 2-3 years, and then do it all over again (and use the wonderful straight stems for beanpoles while you're at it). An alternative, if you don't fancy losing your hazel completely every 3 years, is to take out a third of the stems each year - choose the thickest or any which cross other stems or grow in the wrong direction. That way every three years you'll have rejuvenated the whole coppice anyway.

The coppicing technique can be used to keep otherwise wayward trees like eucalyptus in check (the young leaves it produces when treated this way are fabulous too). And if you coppice willow and dogwood, you'll make the most of the vibrant coloured stems they produce in winter. Pretty and practical, too!

Out with the old...

...and in with the new. Having lost my lovely woodland garden in the hills, I've been able to say "yes" to a new client, someone who's been very patiently waiting for me for nearly a year now. So I have a new garden to look after - always exciting as you come across something you haven't dealt with before every time.

I'm starting for her regularly in the New Year, but I went in for a half-day clear-up the other day just to get a feel for the garden. My new charges this time include an unbelievable climbing rose, at least 20 years old and with a trunk the thickness of a small elephant's leg. They've had a problem with it as it was tied a bit haphazardly to the front of the house and blew off in the wind, so is now rather butchered to keep it within bounds. Time to get out my drill and vine eyes, and do a lot of persuading that this time it will work (honest, guv...)

The other large and very old shrub I'm looking forward to caring for is a Japanese quince - I'll try to take a photo of it and post it in spring, as it's the biggest Japanese quince I've ever seen, too.

I spent a while thinning it out as there was an enormous amount of dead wood in the middle - these are quite untidy shrubs when they're just left to grow, so they're usually trained to a wall, but in this case I can see why the client didn't want to as it's clearly going to be absolutely spectacular in flower. It had spread quite widely out from where it was meant to be so the clump needed reducing a bit. Hopefully though I haven't done too thorough a job, and it'll still be able to wow us all next year.

Cloud-pruning hedges

One of my clients has an accidentally cloud-pruned hedge. This arcane art from Japan is all the rage at the moment, but when I informed her she was cutting edge (literally and metaphorically), she'd never heard of it. The hedge, she told me, had just grown like that: she and her husband had been pruning it with shears since they moved in about 50 years ago and they just followed the contours of the hedge without bothering too much about straight lines and sharp edges.

It's a lovely thing: all curves and sensual, billowing waves. It takes me eight hours to prune it with hand shears each year, which is a real labour of love, but it's worth it. You can see bits of it swelling and retreating as the years go by: holes appear and disappear, and bulges are smoothed out and then turn up somewhere else. I've never been so aware that a hedge is made up of living, breathing plants: beats a boring old box square any day.

Choice choisya

Another good shrub for cutting back at this time of year is Choisya ternata "Sundance". About now those lovely sunny yellow leaves which lifted your spirits through the worst of the winter weather turn a pale washed-out shade of sickly. It's time to prune them off and allow the new, green growth to come through and turn yellow in its place. It also gives the bush a lovely rounded shape for next winter, as the new growth comes through in nice neat rosettes and all stays the same length, more or less.

It's pretty simple - just take the secateurs and trim down to the next rosette of leaves, usually about 6" or so down the stem. If there isn't a rosette, just trim out the whole stem. You don't need to cut it back hard: just shape it to the size you'd like and leave it.

Choisya is one of the few shrubs you can hack back without ruining the appearance: though it does change colour temporarily, from yellow to green, a healthy plant carries enough leaves in the centre of the bush to keep it looking nice and dense. After you've finished, give it a feed of pelleted chicken manure and a good water and mulch, and it'll be set fair to keep you smiling in winter all over again.

Hacking at lilacs

This is a great time of year for cutting back overgrown shrubs, especially spring-flowering ones. Lilac is a prime target, as well as evergreen ceanothus, berberis, pyracantha... pretty much anything that doesn't flower later this year, really.

I spent a couple of hours laying into a client's lilac last week. It must have been 20 years old, and about that long since it was last looked at: it was heavily congested in the centre and the 4" thick branches were splaying outward and endangering his shed. And it was about 25-30ft tall, which would have been fine in a big garden but his is a small-ish suburban strip.

I like to think of this kind of pruning as rejuvenating pruning - though it also counts as common-or-garden hacking back. What you do is remove about a third to a half of the wood - taking out the thickest, oldest branches first, and then any which are pointing in the wrong direction, as well as any which are diseased and/or dead, of course. If you're me, you find it hard to know when to stop, especially with lilacs: when they're overgrown, they tend to develop long, leggy stems with the leaves and flowers right at the very end, and that means once you've taken out the bulk of the shrub, you're left with some rather sad-looking whippy lengths of wood waving around in the breeze. It all looks very odd.

Fear not: this is quite normal. The thing to do is to leave it looking a bit wierd this year, and wait until the stump starts pushing up new growth, which it will do very quickly. Then next year you can cut out another third of the long whippy old wood; and by the third year, when the new growth has got to a decent height and will be flowering well, you can take out the last third to be left with a bush that's all the same height, hopefully a nice shape and full of strapping young growth which looks far nicer and is much more healthy.

Back to the wall

I've been giving my ceanothus a haircut this week, as it's trained against a fence and needs an annual prune to keep it tidy.

Wall-training shrubs which are otherwise inclined to get a bit big and unwieldy is a great way to keep them in bounds. Ceanothus is a good candidate, and so is Japanese quince (Chaenomeles japonica), pyracantha and Garrya elliptica. The small-leaved cotoneaster, C. horizontalis, holds itself so rigid it practically stands up against a wall by itself, without supports.

The principle is pretty straightforward: you'll need supports, such as wires spaced about a foot to 18" apart, to train the shrub onto before you start.

Then, year by year, you shape the shrub so it's flat against the wall. You do this just after flowering: just prune out any branches growing out away from the wall completely or, if you're at risk of ending up with bare stems, you can prune back to one or two leaf joints from the stem.

Tie in side shoots pointing the way you want them to go, and then trim any upward-growing stems to about an inch (2.5cm) below the top of the fence or wall. If any longer side shoots are growing beyond the bounds you want them to keep to, shorten them, too.

Pyracantha in particular makes a really lovely espalier if you do this: ceanothus is a bit more bushy, so you get a pleasing evergreen "coat" to disguise your fence with. In any case, you avoid the problem you get with climbers where they're forever climbing next door, or over the neighbouring shrubs; and it looks great, too.

Trimming to size

Back to the monster mahonia again yesterday - I came to the conclusion that I'd see what happened after I'd done some restorative pruning (i.e. thinning out the very congested centre, removing crossing branches and so on).

Luckily that did take the height down a bit and what with a few judicious cuts which removed the remainder of the really tall bits, I managed to take about 5ft off the top without actually changing the shape of the tree much. I also had a lot of fun climbing about in the canopy - it doesn't take much to get me up clambering about in trees!

Result is a happy client - he got his view back - and happy me, having preserved a very special plant. I've revised my opinion of mahonias and will be recommending them as an unusual architectural plant to designers - but as 20ft trees, not the modest little specimens you see in most gardens.

One other thing - I have for my sins agreed to take over running the garden at my local primary school. Why is it we gardeners are such suckers for co-opting more things to grow and spaces to grow them in? Hopefully I can delegate a lot of the work to other parents - but I have to confess, I'm secretly quite excited about this little pond area they have there, which I plan to make into a fantastic little wildlife garden. Minibeast heaven. More later...