CUTTING EDGE

There are always jobs to be done in the garden no matter the weather, so what are you waiting for?

H aving ended up on my backside myself a few times recently this winter, much to my daughter’s amusement, you’d be forgiven for thinking the last place I would be encouraging you to go would be outdoors and into the garden.

Although these days I have the luxury of choosing the right moment before heading out (a perk of being a head gardener) no matter what the weather is, it’s still never going to be bad enough to stop me from getting outdoors, where there’s always at least one job I can be getting on with.

My favourite job at this time of year is getting the loppers and pruning saw out of the shed for a bit of annual maintenance on the shrubs. Now before you go and start acting like Zorro, wielding your pruning tools about and hacking everything to the ground, it’s important to know and understand just what shrub plants you have.

If you carry out pruning on certain groups at the wrong time of year, this will have a negative effect on their flowering performance.

A really simple way of deciding whether it’s a good time to work on your favourite shrub is through this saying, “if it flowers before June, don’t prune too soon”.

The flowering buds on spring-performing shrubs are produced on the wood of the previous year’s growth, so any branches taken off just now in winter of a white or pink Flowering Currant, or from the masses of bright yellow found on a Forsythia, will mean less, or depending how severely you have pruned, even no flowers at all from them this coming spring.

For these shrubs you are wanting to prune immediately after flowering so the shrub has as much of the growing season as possible to produce flowering shoots for next year.

At this time of year I like to prune just enough for a little bit of fine tuning – much easier to carry out while these deciduous shrubs have no leaves.

First to go are any dead or diseased branches, cutting back to healthy wood – this may even mean its complete removal. Once you get your eye in it can be pretty straight forward to recognise dead wood – it’s usually damaged already or a lighter colour.

If you carefully give the branch a light bend, the dead wood will be brittle and snap, but when unsure I always like to gently scratch off a tiny piece of bark where, if the wood below is green, then I know the branch is actually alive and I want to leave that part alone.

Look out for crossing branches or those rubbing against each other which cause weak points and wounds open to infection, you want to remove these also.

Finally, to keep the plant as healthy as possible, it’s a good idea to remove some of the biggest, oldest branches down to near ground level, easing some of the congestion and allowing air to blow freely through the plant keeping all the nasties away. I would remove no more than one in four branches when doing this.

Although we are still at the beginning of winter we’ve really got until the end of February to get this pruning done, making sure it’s completed in plenty of time for the wounds to have healed, before the sap starts flowing within the plant again. In some cases it’s better too; why would we want to cut down the beautiful red, yellow and orange coloured stems of a dogwood just now, when there are still plenty weeks of winter left to enjoy them?

I do feel sorry for these plants. In my opinion they are the most abused and mistreated in the plant kingdom. Able to survive in the majority of soils and the toughest of conditions, cultivars of Cornus alba, C.sanguinea and C.stolonifera are quite rightly a popular choice for car parks, but if they were pruned correctly they could be giving us the most beautiful winter display in these black tarmac gardens.

It breaks my heart seeing them pointlessly chopped with a hedge trimmer, completely the wrong practice for these shrubs, to the shape of a rectangle removing all the vibrant colourful young growth. I can’t believe this practice is saving any time or effort than if it was properly pruned. A plant pruned correctly will thank us in return.

WINTER JOB FOR THE WEEK

It’s felt like a good old proper winter this year, with mostly cold weather and some snow to enjoy. Watch out for heavy, wet snow that, when it sits on the tops of hedges, can splay them open or weigh down the branches of trees and shrubs, risking snapping and breaking them. It’s a good idea to use a stick or cane to knock this snow before it has a chance to cause damage.

Oh, and make sure the zip of your jacket is right up, I’ve heard it’s not nice if snow gets inside your top…

There are still plenty of jobs to do in the garden, despite the cold weather.

It’s a good idea to knock the snow off hedges and shrubs.