Martin Fish takes the secateurs to his jasmine
I’ll get stuck in with the secateurs now for plenty of spring blooms
Several years ago I grew a Jasminum
polyanthum in a pot for its attractive white, sweetly-scented flowers. It’s a lovely plant, but difficult to grow long-term in a container because it can be vigorous, so I decided to plant it in my greenhouse border on the end wall. It can withstand temperatures down to freezing, making it ideal for a frost-free greenhouse, where it stays evergreen over the winter and then in mid-to-late spring the clusters of flowers open and fill the greenhouse with a heady perfume.
When planted in the soil it makes lots of growth and if left to grow would soon fill my greenhouse with s stems and foliage! Annual pruning is essential to keep this twining climber under control and this needs to be done after flowering to allow the plant the rest of the summer to make new flowering wood for next year.
The aim when pruning is to cut back as much of the old flowering stems as possible, but this
isn’t as easy as you think, simply because the long stems twist and grow together to make a mass of growth. It’s one of those pruning jobs that looks easy when you see a diagram, but in reality, you’ve just got to get stuck in with a pair of sharp secateurs and cut back to a framework of old wood. Fortunately, jasmine will grow from old
wood, so if the plant’s very overgrown you can cut back hard, which is what I’m going to
have to do as it’s getting too large. I also want to renew the bubble polythene later in the season. Once I’ve pruned to reduce the size, I’ll feed around the base of the plant with sulphate of potash. This doesn’t encourage vigorous growth; instead it helps the new stems to ripen and will hopefully encourage plenty of flowers for next spring.