Category Archives: pruning

A figgy pudding

29 Monday Feb 2016

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fig1

Now here’s a pretty mess…

Spent a happy day today pruning a large and rather unwieldy fig tree. This seems to be a theme of my gardening life at the moment: I look after two overgrown fig trees at the moment and March (I know, it’s late Feb, but we can stretch a point) is the time to have a go at them.

You don’t want to do too much all at once. The older wood is less fruitful, so that’s what you want to target, leaving younger wood to be productive later in the year (hopefully, if it’s sunny enough). Take all the older wood out at once, though, and you send the tree into a state of outraged shock from which it may never recover.

fig2

First decide which of your big branches to get rid of. This one’s a goner…

So I’ve taken out one in four of the oldest trunks – which effectively in this case just means one major trunk, the one which was crossing all the others and going in totally the wrong direction.

I also removed the (smaller) side branches which were heading away from the wall into the path – necessity, this, as otherwise you couldn’t really walk past. It may have taken me over the top a little with the amount I’ve removed, so fingers crossed I haven’t overdone it.

fig3

That should do the trick (I removed a lot of the ivy behind as well – training things against ivy never ends well). Good to see my assistant head gardeners inspecting my handiwork, too.

The eventual idea is to train this back against the wall as a fan, but it will be at least three and probably more like five years before we get there. You do need a little patience to be a gardener…

Hedging my bets #2

25 Tuesday Jan 2011

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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

01 Monday Feb 2010

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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

23 Monday Nov 2009

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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

10 Tuesday Nov 2009

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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

19 Monday Oct 2009

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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

25 Wednesday Mar 2009

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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

06 Friday Feb 2009

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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

27 Wednesday Aug 2008

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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

05 Monday May 2008

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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….