Pruning can be kindest cut of all

Whether you’re cutting back excess foliage, removing spent blooms, reducing the height of a plant or snipping away at dead or diseased wood, it’s all recognised as essential pruning. And that is a year-round gardening activity.

Approaching autumn sees the removal of dead herbaceous stems that would otherwise litter the garden over winter, exceptions being those with ornamental seed capsules or attractive spent flower heads that are enhanced by frost or snow or wanted for indoor arrangements. Teasel (dispacus), poppy (papaver) and yarrow (achillea) are personal favourites. With necessary spent growth removed, we can then weed and point over the soil before applying an organic mulch.

December onward offers us a skeletal view of deciduous woody perennials, shrubs, currant fruit bushes, gooseberries, apples and the like, so it’s the ideal time to prune some but not all. For example, winter pruning of plum trees creates wounds that allow the debilitating silver leaf disease entry. Safest time to act is May/ June, in the absence of frost.

Tempting though it is to take secateurs to all shrubs in late autumn, “Just to tidy them up” as one gardening acquaintance once put it, and wondered why they never bloomed, you could be doing more harm than good. It would minimise the display of winter flowering types, viburnum, jasmine etc. and spring icons such as forsythia are currently covered in ripened stems that will burst into a golden May display. Don’t remove those until they’ve done their job.

Lavatera ‘Barnsley Baby’ is in full glorious bloom right now with soft, vigorous growth, that will suffer in strong autumn winds and winter frost. It’s fine at present but in late September I’ll reduce the height. Pruning at the right time, can be the kindest cut of all!