Bertie's Cottage

Plants’ water content is at its lowest around the time of the New Moon, so it is the ideal moment to prune, with the least likelihood that sap will bleed from the cuts. Therefore, on Saturday, a ‘fruit’ day, and in the afternoon (while plants’ energies are drawn in towards the earth), I thinned my blackcurrants and gooseberries, and cut the vines back hard. Then by good chance, rather than design, on the actual day of the New Moon, Simon Hall, a tree surgeon friend came to visit and lop the oak that was brushing our neighbour’s chimney pot and casting shade on our greenhouse. Fantastic timing!

He took out a good half of the boughs, with all the lower, spreading branches cut off close to the trunk. Shaped more like a vase than a mushroom now, the oak still casts an elegant silhouette against the sky. Rather than opting to thin the remaining crown to let in more light, I wanted the branches unblemished by stumps, so every remaining branch is intact from start to finish, and no hideous stumps mar their beauty.

Cutting back hard to the trunk is almost always a good policy when pruning shrubs too, if you want them to retain a ‘natural’ outline. Secateurs, loppers and saws are the tools to use, not shears or hedge trimmers. My all-time gardening bête noir is the ubiquitous ‘blob’ bush, all it’s natural character obliterated by ‘trimming’. Two-inch-thick woody stumps rear up waist high, sprouting bunches of spindly fingers on the ends, that within only months will once more undergo the attentions of the shears. It’s nothing short of cruelty!