My year of LIVING DANGEROUSLY
Hard-pruning a favourite shrub unexpectedly paid off... but not everything went to plan in 2023
When a head gardener friend dropped by unexpectedly last April, I gave him a guided tour of my garden. As we chatted about my plants, I told him that I wanted to hard prune an enormous honey spurge (Euphorbia mellifera). Rather than back my plan, he warned me that the shrub might not recover from such rough treatment.
A month later, I unholstered my secateurs and faced the 10ft high by 9ft wide semi-evergreen gem which was blocking out light and obstructing a path.
With my friend’s warning in my head, I gingerly snipped away — before I decided to ignore him and brutally reduced it to a 3ft high cluster of mainly bare stems.
Despite considering myself knowledgeable
I breathed a sigh of relief when I spotted some tiny pink buds
about plants, I was still worried about what I had done.
So I breathed a sigh of relief when, about three weeks later, I spotted some tiny pink buds. These nascent shoots grew rapidly over summer and the once rangy plant is now a 4ft tall, nicely shaped specimen.
This positive response to hard pruning by my cherished honey spurge is one of the highlights of my gardening year.
And while it’s appropriate on this day to be reflective — looking back on the highs and lows of the past 12 months — at the same time it’s fitting to make plans that will have an impact on our plots in the future.
Over the past year I’ve introduced many plants to my garden. Not all are worth singling out, but I must mention three dahlia varieties — ‘Avignon’, ‘David Howard’ and ‘Kelvin Floodlight’. I planted several tubers of each in large pots last spring and they provided a riot of colour from mid-July all the way to November.
In early summer I decided to plug a gap in a shady bed with three Heuchera ‘Black Pearl’, a perennial with glossy, jet-black leaves. As a result I have created a striking plant combination, with the heucheras contrasting with golden yellow Hakonechloa ‘Sunflare’ and the camouflage-patterned leaves of Podophyllum ‘Spotty Dotty’.
Of course it is also exciting when old plants do something for the first time. In this case I’m referring to some olive trees in my front garden that finally produced fruit. I was going to pick and cure the crop but was put off by the finickity process. However, the copious black fruits still looked amazing and were a talking point on my street.
On the downside, another tree that I expected to deliver a bumper crop of fruit proved a damp squib. The plant in question was a loquat, which flowered well last winter and should have been laden with orange fruit in spring. In the end there were just two, and they were eaten by birds before I’d had a chance to pick them. Last winter was the worst I can remember for losing special plants. Among notable deaths were an Abyssinian banana (Ensete ventricosum ‘Maurelii’), Lamprocapnos ‘Valentine’ and Hibiscus ‘Kopper King’. Most missed was a 5ft by 4ft specimen of Salvia ‘Amistad’, which left a big gap to fill.
Apart from wanting to introduce lots of new plants to my garden in 2024, along with finding room for a few old favourites, I have plenty of little jobs to keep me busy in the months ahead. For example, I want to replace the rotting oak sleepers that form a frame around my gravel garden and have to find time to repair a shed roof.
Elsewhere, my raised pond requires some attention. Its overflow device is clearly blocked and needs clearing to prevent water spilling over the sides during heavy rain. And in spring, I’ll rejuvenate its tired containers and introduce some more fish to give my solitary shubunkin a bit of company.