LETTER OF THE WEEK

I pruned my ‘Graham Thomas’ honeysuckle last autumn to about 2ft from the ground because it was only flowering at the top, but this has only created thin spindly growth. I am reluctant to prune it lower in case I kill it. Can you advise please? The plant is about 15 years old.

STEVE MORTON, VIA EMAIL

I gather from regular readers I meet that I have a bit of a tough “off with its head” attitude to plants that don’t cut the mustard, but I do think that you may have overdone the radical lopping here, and I am not really surprised that your ‘Graham Thomas’ honeysuckle (a lovely cream-flowered, redberried version of Lonicera periclymenum) has objected to being brutally hacked at the knees.

The natural habitat of twiners such as honeysuckle is the cool, often sunless ground among deciduous trees, from which they then climb so that their flowers are produced higher up in the sun with the pollinators.

Gardeners, however, tend to plant honeysuckles out of their comfort zones, as often as not in the arid soil near fences, against sunny walls, or even where roots can only expand under oft-baked paving stones – where it can struggle, becoming pest-ridden, mildewed and feeble. Last summer must have been especially tough for your plant and it would have benefited, after its dramatic pruning, from a feed with a general fertiliser (blood, fish and bone) extra water, slowly applied during the hot weather, and a thick mulch over a wide area in which its roots (after 15 years) have spread.

This spring, give the plant the TLC just described, snip the ends of the “spindly” shoots it made last year to encourage them to make additional climbing side shoots, and watch it improve. And if it doesn’t? A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do

– and get the spade out.