No weeping over willow
If a plant is past its best, or has grown far too big, don’t be afraid to cut it out and move on
WHILE the soil is still warm it’s a great time to put new plants in the ground, or dig up others to move them about.
So take a good look at your garden and if changes are needed, act now. However, sometimes the best improvements can be made by removing plants rather than adding more.
I’ve been adding to my garden for the past five years. It’s been non-stop development, but over the last few weeks I’ve been looking at the structure, the bare bones of the garden.
On one perimeter there is a medium-sized goat willow, Salix caprea. This is a common enough plant but I did enjoy the beautiful
shape of its crown. However it’s adding little else to the garden. Every spring the ground beneath was carpeted in greyish catkins and its leaves appear to have some sort of disfiguring virus.
I’ve spent the year looking at it, appreciating the job it was doing in terms of creating privacy and background, but all the time wondering whether it should be for the chop.
Garden-wise this is a big decision but sometimes you have to make bold choices.
Most of us have fairly limited spaces and when I consider the beautiful plants we can grow, to have a large plant that you are unsure about seems a waste of space.
Ask yourself – do I really like it? Is it doing an important job?
So I got out the handsaw, took off one of the lower branches, and saw straight away the space opening up and the light flooding in.
I continued over the weekend, sawing it limb by limb, and gradually a whole new section of blue sky opened above.
Plants around it will finally have room to breathe and there’s a whole new border area which can be planted up with some choice specimens.
It does leave me with a gap at the perimeter where I will need something evergreen for privacy, but I don’t want anything that will block out all that light again.
The space is fairly near to the house so I’d like something quite special.
I’m thinking about Eucryphia, a wonderful evergreen tree from the southern hemisphere which is smothered in large white blossoms towards the end of summer, which makes it unusual and garden worthy.
Eucryphias grow quite tall so aren’t suitable for most small gardens, but the likes of ‘Rostrevor’ are fairly columnar in shape so will be more slimline than the willow. Another option could be an elegant bamboo, one that will clump gently and not send out runners across the garden.