How to make a coldframe #3

Right, now having blown your brain cutting impossibly shallow angles for the upright dividers (I hope it wasn't that bad - I "borrowed" my husband's professional shed-making machinery so I cheated)... now here's an easier bit of woodwork for you.

The battens you attach to the uprights are to hold the cladding in place, and should measure 25mm x 25mm, though I couldn't find that at my local branch of Wickes so settled for 25mm x 38mm. As you can see from the pic you only need them along the top edge and down the two vertical sides of the dividers - not along the bottom. You'll obviously need the battens on both sides of the two central dividers.

You do need to cut the top batten to shape at an angle, but it's a lot easier this time. Use the edge of a bit of cut-off batten wood as a spacer to work out how far down you need to attach the batten itself (if you're using 25x38mm wood, use the 25mm edge). Just line the spacer up with the top edge of the divider and draw a line underneath. This marks where the top edge of the batten will go.

Then cut the batten to about 10cm (4") too long at each end and nail it on so that it lines up with the mark. After that, it's just a matter of cutting the ends off flush with the divider.

The upright battens are far easier - unless you're a real perfectionist (or are borrowing your husband's shed-building machinery) you don't need to cut the ends at an angle as they go in pretty close anyway, certainly close enough to fix the cladding to. You do still need to do the thing with the spacer, though, or the cladding won't lie flush with the uprights.

After you've done all that, you'll also need to put in an extra bit of battening all around the inside edge of the two end dividers - the divider in the picture is an end divider, so you can see how I've done this if you look closely. This is so that you can attach the cladding across them to form the ends of the coldframe. Again, you don't need to be too exact - just cut the battens off straight and fit them in as snugly as you can.

I'll get on to cladding the ends next time, and all this will hopefully start to make a bit more sense.

In case you missed the previous bits of this inordinately long series, here they are:

How to make a coldframe #1

How to make a coldframe #2

Crossing over

It's not often you find a gardener who's a designer. Or, for that matter, a designer who will readily admit to being a gardener: the best ones will usually be keen gardeners in their own gardens, but professionally there's not much cross-over between the two.

As time goes on, though, I'm finding the lines are becoming increasingly blurred for me between professional gardening and designing. I've had two regular clients ask me to design their gardens, or bits of them: one is a clear-ground project which will probably take years as we're doing it mostly by hand; the other is a perfectly good garden at the moment which they're about to rip up for an extension, so it'll need a re-work afterwards.

What's more, a designer I sometimes work for as a gardener has now asked me to help her out and design part of two of her clients' gardens - they've asked for veggie gardens and she doesn't know much about vegetables.

So all of a sudden, I find myself being a professional gardener and a designer.

Well that got me thinking. I actually really enjoy designing with plants - not so keen on the concrete and garden furniture bit, but love the idea of putting my favourite plants together so that they really sing. I've started to wonder if I might be able to break the mould a bit, and wear two hats at the same time - professional gardener, and plant designer.

To that end (and so that I'm not entirely talking out of my backside when asked to do these projects) I've signed up for a college course at Capel Manor College in London. This is one of the better design colleges, and to its great credit has a garden design course that concentrates solely on plant design. I'm starting by learning how to draw (never a great strength of mine) - first lesson at the end of next month. Wish me luck!

Plant of the month - March

Hyacinth 'Delft Blue'

I had always thought of hyacinths as the sort of flower your grandma grows. That is, until I saw them in the late great Christopher Lloyd's border at Great Dixter. As regular readers will know, I'm a big fan of Mr Lloyd's, so anything that's good enough for him is good enough for me. When I went, he had 'King of the Blues' in his Long Border, and it truly zinged out at you from among the spring flowers - not gaudy, as some over-bred primroses are, for example, but just pure, joyous blue.

I couldn't find 'King of the Blues' so had to opt for 'Delft Blue' - a more commonly-grown type but nonetheless superb for that. At this time of year its uncompromising china blue stands up beautifully to the butter-yellow daffodils all around it - this is not a wishy-washy plant, and all the better for it. You can force them to grow indoors - the usual excuse is to enjoy the scent at close quarters, but to be honest I find it overwhelming and a little sickly in the house. Far better to have it scattered on the wind so you catch a little puff of it as you pass by - one of those utterly blissful moments that gardening is all about. It seems grandma knew a trick or two after all.

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.

Blowing a hooley

I've spent much of today hunkered down in my office, looking out at a scene of wild and woolly weather.

We've had gales of about 60-70 mph here - not quite as bad as the coast, where it's got to 80mph, but quite bad enough. My heart is in my mouth on days like these: with the ground already sodden after a wet winter, the trees' roots are loose in the ground and so vulnerable to a big gust. Luckily - or unluckily, depending on how you look at it - the only casualty so far has been the cherry tree over the road: as you can see, it's lost most of its crown, and it was in full blossom, too. I hear one of the Scots pines in the woods nearby has gone down, too. We're surrounded by trees here, so it's rare that we have a storm and nothing suffers.

I'm old enough to remember the hurricane of '87, and though it's not exactly been that sort of thing today, it's quite bad enough. Then, most of Kew was flattened and we lost some of our oldest historic trees - grown men wept when they first saw the devastation. I'm hoping we won't have any reports of that sort of damage today, but I do also remember that then it was a time of renewal: a lot of plantings that had become stale and tired-looking were rejuvenated as new saplings, often in re-thought designs and in exciting new varieties, were planted to replace the old dinosaurs. As they say, it's an ill wind...

Waxing lyrical

When I'm not out in the garden, or writing about it, it seems I'm listening to things about it... This morning it was a little gem on Woman's Hour, on Radio Four, that caught my attention. It was an interview with garden historian Jenny Uglow in her suspiciously neat-sounding shed (she could get inside it, along with a radio reporter, for a start).

Jenny's delightful book, A Little History of British Gardening, is one of the treasures on my bookshelf. It's full of interesting things, and so was her interview on garden tools - as regular readers will know, I'm a bit of an anorak where the tools of my trade are concerned.

Anyway, did you know, for example, that painting your tools blue keeps flies off? Or that one of the daily tasks for Victorian estate gardeners was squeezing ants?

The report also had a little ditty which I just have to share - I'm sure everyone else has come across it already, but I had the delight of discovering it for the first time:

"From where the old thick laurels grow along the toolshed wall
You find the tool and potting sheds, which are the heart of all.
The cold frames, and the hothouses, the dungpits and the tanks,
The rollers, carts and drainpipes with the barrows and the planks,

And there you'll see the gardeners, the men and 'prentice boys,
Told off to do as they are bid, and do it without noise;
For except when seeds are planted and we shout to scare the birds,
The glory of the garden, it abideth not in words.

Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made
By singing, "Oh, how beautiful!" and sitting in the shade.
Far better men than we go out and start their working lives
In grubbing weeds from gravel paths, with broken dinner knives."

I discover from Jenny's book that this is actually by Rudyard Kipling - it's called The Glory of the Garden. In case you're interested (the internet is a wonderful thing... but it does also encourage you to go on a bit) there's more:

"There's not a pair of legs so thin, there's not a head so thick,
There's not a hand so weak and white, nor yet a heart so sick,
But it can find some needful job that's crying to be done,
For the Glory of the Garden glorifieth every one.

Then seek your job with thankfulness and work till further orders,
If it's only netting strawberries or killing slugs on borders;
And when your back stops aching and your hands begin to harden,
You will find yourself a partner in the Glory of the Garden.

Oh, Adam was a gardener, and God who made him sees
That half a proper gardener's work is done upon his knees,
So when your work is finished, you can wash your hand and pray
For the Glory of the Garden, that it may not pass away!"

That's quite enough of that - ed.

How to make a cold frame #2

Hmm... photography never was my strong point, but bear with me here.

For my mega-coldframe I've adapted the design from Terence Conran's Garden DIY, a very handy little book which has lots of useful projects and explains things simply enough even for novices like me. I've made both my compost bins from a design in this book, and very successful they've been too (when I make the third, I'll put that on here too). So if anything in my description of how to make these doesn't make sense - get the book.

After getting the base right, it's time for some woodwork. This design centres around dividing frames, which are then held together using the cladding. I suspect it will have little structural strength in the long run - i.e. I won't be able to move it much - but that doesn't bother me: if it bothers you, you'll need to work in some stronger connecting pieces to hold the dividers together.

The dividers are made from 2x2 (5cmx5cm for the metrically-minded) treated timber. Measure the depth (front to back) and width (side to side) of the space you have available - the good thing about this particular design is that you can have as many or as few dividers as you like, so the coldframe can be whatever size you wish. Mine is made up of three sections, so I've made four dividers (two at each end, two in the middle), which will eventually be spaced a little over 2ft apart.

For each divider, cut a length to fit the depth, then two more for the uprights: one at 1ft (30cm) and one at 18" (45cm). Finally, cut the length that will slope across the top: it'll need to be the same length as the base, plus about 4" (10cm).

Nail the two uprights on to the base at each end, using 2 3" nails at each joint, driven in at an angle - this will mean the joint is much firmer and won't pull apart.

To set the top rail, lay it across the two uprights so that it rests lining up with their top surfaces, and mark off the angle it lies at. It'll only be a very slight slope. Saw this off so that the top surfaces of the two uprights are now at an angle (hopefully the same).

Nail the top rail across them, using the same angled-nail technique as before, and leaving a length of rail sticking out from each end. Finally, saw off the ends of the top rail so that they lie flush with the uprights.

Next: putting on support battens (you can see a couple in the picture above - sneak preview!)

Grape expectations

I've been digging out big clumps of grape hyacinths (Muscari armeniacum) from a client's garden this morning, where they'd formed great grassy swathes and looked a bit like hairy wigs.

Before you think I've gone entirely crazy - what, digging up spring bulbs in spring? - this is actually a great time of year to do this job. I happened to know from last year that a lot of these muscari were coming up blind - that is, lots of foliage but no flowers. It's a general tendency most spring bulbs have if they're doing a little too well and have formed big, congested clumps. The only remedy is to dig up the clumps and remove about 3/4 of the bulbs, then replant.

The thing about doing it at this time of the year is, you can see the flower buds forming at the base of the leaves, so you can tell which clumps are blind and which aren't. They don't mind being hoicked out and replanted, even in flower - just water them back in and they'll get on with things as if they'd never been disturbed.

Plant of the month - February

Libertia peregrinans



I discovered this plant through Christopher Lloyd, who writes about it in his book, "Succession Planting for Adventurous Gardeners" - something of a bible of mine. Anyway, as so often with new (to me, anyway) plants Lloyd suggests, it's quickly become a firm favourite of mine.

It's what they call a good do-er - rarely needs any particular TLC, tough as anything, evergreen - or should that be evergold in this case? - and just does its stuff all year round. It's an excellent plant for structure - I've got it planted between a Spiraea japonica "Gold Mound" and a Pinus mugo, where it retreats into the background a bit in summer and then at this time of the year (and indeed for most of the winter) really shines out. It has a lovely, warm burnished bronzey-gold colour that glows in low sunshine and makes those sword-like leaves shoot up, shining, from the surrounding plants.

Mine is still a young plant, but I'm hoping if it's happy it'll form a nice beefy clump in time. It almost seems like an afterthought, but it does also have pretty iris-like white flowers later in spring, too.

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!

How to make a cold frame #1

Just occasionally I'm not so much a gardener as a builder. When you're developing a garden, the first several stages involve an awful lot of digging, lugging stone around and construction - it all seems to take ages and hasn't got a great deal to do with plants. But if you have the patience to do it, it's worth it.

I've been struggling to manage in recent years without a decent coldframe, so this spring I've decided to bite the bullet and make myself a super-deluxe model, the entire length of my 8' greenhouse and about 3'6" from front to back. This is not small for a coldframe - but then my greenhouse is already groaning with seedlings and I've only just started early sowings, so I do need the extra space!

As you'll see in the picture, the first step, before I so much as banged in a nail, was to sort out the area where the coldframe was to go. There were two blackcurrant bushes here, which were always a bit close to the greenhouse for comfort, so I moved them to the allotment this winter. I had to hoick out a spare gooseberry bush, too - not such a well-thought-out manoevre as I hadn't anywhere to put it. Luckily I've got two more to the right of this area, so I'm not exactly going to go short.

Then I marked out the area and dug it down to half-a-spade's depth. This is a really useful depth for hard landscaping - it does for paths, patios... pretty much anything, really.

Next I edged the area with boards - I used 4" boards, but you can use standard gravel boards which are 6". These were attached to short stakes at the corners and checked for straightness with a spirit level.

I roughly levelled out the earth inside the boards, and then put down some weed-suppressing membrane, stapled to the boards on the inside to about 1/2" from the top (you can just about see the edges in the picture). And, finishing touch, about 9 bags of gravel from the local DIY store. This means you can level it easily, and the coldframe isn't resting on bare earth - which means it won't rot so quickly, either.

Next instalment... the start of the woodwork!

Getting things through the winter

I was checking over my geraniums this week. I've got a few I'm overwintering for myself, plus a few for a couple of clients, and then there's another client who has a whole balcony full of them and needs them all lifting in autumn, overwintering and then setting back out in spring.

You'll hear lots of different methods of overwintering geraniums (I should say, more correctly, pelargoniums), but here's what I do. It's pretty simple.

You take the plants out of the pots they've been in all summer, and pot up in a plastic pot which just fits the roots (i.e. you don't have too much spare soil left over). General-purpose compost is fine - anything too loamy and they get too damp. Then I take the secateurs to them: any leggy stems are cut back to a bud or leaf joint about 4-5" (10cm or so) above soil level. It seems drastic, but it keeps the plants compact as they'll grow again from these points next year instead of starting a foot or two up in the air.

I give them one, very light watering, taking care not to wet leaves or stems, mostly just to settle them in to the pots. And then I switch on the greenhouse heater with the thermostat set to a few degrees above zero, and leave them to it.

I water them maybe twice the whole winter long. There are two secrets to overwintering pelargoniums successfully: first, they need to be very nearly bone dry, so once you've watered them when you transplant them, that's pretty much it until February.

Second, you need to check them over at least once a week and remove any dead or dying leaves and stems. Botrytis, or downy mildew, or whatever that fluffy mould is that grows on dead geranium leaves is murder for overwintering plants and will spread like wildfire. You need to remove the leaves regularly to keep it in check, and take them out of the greenhouse too so the spores aren't hanging around. If you do it regularly, you'll find the fresh leaves will stay fresh and you'll have greenery all winter. Harden them off carefully in early May, when you're sure frosts are past (probably a bit later further north) and you can keep them going for years.

Plant of the month - January

Pyracantha 'Saphyr Jaune'

These little jewels have been cheering up my garden since last autumn. Pyracantha can be the only really bright colour shining through the dull months of winter, and they're all the more welcome for that. The birds have snaffled the red and orange berries already - I have P. 'Saphyr Orange' and P. 'Saphyr Rouge' planted along the same fence, and they're meant to mix 'n' mingle, but the yellow is all that's left. No complaints here, though - I'm just grateful to have such a dainty little sprinkling of colour at this time of year.

Pyracantha is one of those shrubs which is doing something useful all year round. I keep mine trained against the fence - I find they become badly-behaved thugs in the border if left unsupervised. If you're strict with them, though, they behave themselves beautifully. They're one of the few plants which provides evergreen climbing cover all year, and as a sideline are excellent security - climb over a fence clad in pyracantha and you won't forget it in a hurry. As if that wasn't enough, they froth up with flowers in early summer and then sparkle all winter too. I wouldn't be without them.

Outside again at last!

Well after what seems like weeks and weeks of non-stop rain, I'm gardening again!

The water table is still high, but the rain has subsided to a light drizzle and the floods have abated enough to allow me to get a fork into the ground without turning it to mud. I'm back to a full slate of gardens and muddy knees.

This week I was tackling an out-of-control mixed hedge, containing hazel, conifers (not sure exactly what - it's not a strong point of mine, but I think it's some sort of cypress), and various assorted self-seeded things like ash saplings.

I'm all for mixed, aka wildlife hedges - I've got one at the end of my garden which is part adapted from what was already there and part encouraged by transplanting, say, a hawthorn sapling that self-seeded itself where it wasn't wanted. But you do have to keep on top of them or, like most native species, they go mad.

Hazel in particular heads for the sky very quickly indeed. I've got one in my hedge which I keep under very strict control - any stems going in the wrong direction are snipped out right away. I let it grow well above the line of the hedge (I think it makes the hedge more interesting to have plants of different heights from time to time) but I do take out a few of the thickest and tallest branches each year. You can, of course, just shear over the top with hedge-clippers, which is a brutal sort of way of doing it but very effective in keeping it in bounds.

This one in my client's garden, though, was about 50ft high, so that was rather out of the question. In the way that hazels do, it had multi-stemmed and several of the trunks were leaning quite heavily into the main garden. Well - I did the best I could, and pruned back the worst of it into the hedge line again. But in this case, as it's quite a high hedge, I've advised the client to get a tree man in (gardeners aren't qualified, insured, or brave enough, to tackle full-grown trees - it's much better to get a proper arborist in). Hopefully s/he will curb the general skywards tendency and cut it back to just below the top line of the hedge - then it doesn't matter if it sends up some thinner shoots, as I can keep them in a kind of pollard and make them behave themselves.

Sometimes situations just don't comply with the textbooks, and you have to find your own way around.

Disappearing under water

As I write, I'm listening to the sound of a gale howling around my house and the rain splattering the windows with a viciousness which makes you realise why they talk about nasty weather. I've just had to cancel my third garden this week - and that's after last week when I only made it to one of my clients and was washed out for the rest.

There's nothing more depressing than being forced to stay indoors when you don't want to. There's not even anything very nice to look at outside: the path around the greenhouse I've been digging in my garden (of which, hopefully, more later) is now a stream, and when I walked down the garden to let the chickens out I was splashing through the film of water that now covers the lawn. The water table is as high as it's ever been in my normally dry and sandy conditions, and even if it were sunny you'd have to bail out a hole before you could dig it.

I'm sorry - I do try to be optimistic on the whole - but January is, by far, the worst month of the year.

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!

Cruelty to plants

Look what I discovered when I was clearing a neglected bit of shrubbery at a client's garden the other day.

Now, call me soppy, but I really wince when I see plants in pain like this. What's happened is that a little sapling of some pretty little ornamental tree has been planted and then, quite correctly, supported with a stake and a proper tree tie.

Trouble is, nobody came back to visit it. For years, from the looks of the poor thing. It was half the size it should have been, and then there's that awful scar.... Well, I had great pleasure from tearing out that tree tie from the groove it had gouged in the bark, and imagining the sap rising at last (well, next spring anyway) free from such terrible restrictions.

So let this be a lesson to us all: go and check your tree ties! Loosen them gradually if they need it, though trees shouldn't need supporting after the first two or three years so you can take them right off (and remove the stake) after this length of time. Your trees will thank you.

Plant of the month - November

Cynara cardunculus

Cardoon

In the depths of winter when there's little else to entertain, this is a marvellous change from the usual evergreen blobs. Massive architectural stems hold aloft these sculptural pincushions right through the worst of the weather. Even better are the downy tufts of golden fluff that sit inside, adored by the birds for winter nest material, and beautiful when the sun catches them, too. They're mostly gone by this time of year - though you can see some of the effect here:

As you can see, the resident flock of bluetits (and sparrows, and starlings, and robins...) have had their chunk, but isn't that butterscotch yellow gorgeous against a blue winter sky?

As if all that wasn't enough, cardoons hold a rosette of serrated, sword-shaped slate-green leaves at the base all winter, which then develop into even more stately beauty next year. I love cardoons at any time, but now they take centre stage and I appreciate them more than any other plant in the garden. You can't ask for more than that.