What did we learn yesterday? Gardens, whilst being ephemeral and ever-changing, are also potentially long-lasting. With trees, you should never plant without considering the consequences. Our yew trees had failed because they had been stuck in the ground fifty years ago, and nobody had considered how they were to be maintained. That will always lead to disaster. How many of us in our more modest houses have neighbours with a weeping willow in their garden which crowds everything else out and sucks all the moisture from the soil, causing subsidence? Or a shallow-rooting eucalyptus which blows over in a high wind taking the roof with it. How many suburban gardens are plagued by the so-called clump-forming bamboo Phyllostachys nigra, which romps across the land, respecting no fence or boundary?
It's the same with shrubs. It is all too easy to be seduced by the label or catalogue description, which gives a height and spread for each bush that actually represents an estimate of its dimensions after five years. Buy on this basis at your peril. Surely the Old Man had no idea when he planted his 6' x 6' smoke bushes close to all his grass paths that after forty years they would reach 15' x15' and that his gardeners would have no clue what to do with them when they did. Other than to hedge them up to the very edge of the grass and leave them to achieve whatever height they liked, thus turning every border into a wall. Come on, that's not a garden. I don't have any perfect illustrations of this, but there are one or two pre-restoration shrub border photos which show what mess can look like. They don't make a blog look attractive, though, hence the inclusion of yet another tulip picture at the beginning.
So, here we come to the next in our series of tips.
Firstly, always leave more space than you think will be necessary. Do you want to have to mutilate your plants later to keep them where you thought they would stay, or have you the patience to wait till they fill their allotted space naturally? (The second option is the correct one).
Secondly, what do you do if they still insist on growing beyond your tolerance? That's called pruning, and it differs immensely from what most people do with their wayward shrubs. There are a number of points to be considered here. One of those is when to do the work. Well, there are so many rules about pruning that people have written whole volumes on the subject, mostly with the effect of maintaining a level of secrecy and mythology about the subject which is entirely unnecessary. You are not going to do irreparable harm to most subjects by giving it a go. If the plant you are dealing with is one of those where you will damage it by pruning, that is, if it is one of those tricky customers that does not regrow after cutting back, then one of two things has happened. You may have been too vigorous in your excitement, and cut back too hard into old wood, which some plants don't like, or you may have chosen the wrong plant for that position in the first place. In this case, it will always have been destined to grow beyond its bounds, and you should have thought of that before planting it there, and trying to rescue it by unsuitable pruning. The answer is quite simple. Admit your mistake and pull it up. Replace it with something else, or replant the same thing, but in the right place, further back for example. Don't get sentimental about your plants. They are the materials you create your art with. They are not sacrosanct. Treat them like paint on a canvas. You can rub them out and get it right next time.
What about the shrubs that do respond to pruning? Well, that's easy, isn't it? Anybody can do that? That's what you would think when looking at the confident swipes people take at their gardens with various chopping, slashing and cutting implements. But look closely at what they are doing. For the most part your average domestic gardener or hard-pressed contractor will make a choice from a limited range of options. He (or she) will either take the hedgecutters to the object of their irritation, and make a garden of unsightly blobs of various degrees of uniformity, or he (I'm not going to constantly repeat the content of my parentheses) will, believing him ( ) self superior to such affronts, produce the secateurs and proceed to apply carefully considered cuts to his ( ) shrubs. Only rarely will what he (not going to bother with the brackets any more) does accord with what I would do. Far too often you will see him try to create a shape which does not obscure the lawn or interfere with the plant next to it, and by using secateurs will consider he has improved on the hedgecutter technique. But oh so often, he has only achieved the same effect, but much slower. Why on earth do people always assume that pruning involves selectively cutting the ends off branches?
Pruning should be about making the shrub look like a natural specimen of its type, but smaller than before. Cutting the end off anything will stimulate growth from the buds immediately below the cut, and produce a bird's nest of regrowth that immediately takes on the impenetrable form of a hedged plant. In some cases, this may be what you want. On the other hand, the only way to provide a natural look to the object of your attention, is to select the growth that needs to be removed, and go all the way with it. Trace it right back to where it originates, and cut it off there. It may start as a side-shoot from another branch, in which case that is where you remove it, at its point of origin. Or it may have grown out of the soil, in which case take it back to ground level. What is left will carry the natural shape of the species and will always look more beautiful and harmonious in your border.
Think of a Philadelphus, the mock orange, with its scented blossom in summer. What do the pruning manuals tell you to do with that? Wait till after they have flowered, then cut off the flowered shoots, leaving the new growth to flower next year. The problem is that all pruning rules stem from the needs of fruit growers, and are designed to produce the maximum amount of flowers, to result in the greatest yield of fruit. In the ornamental garden that is not necessarily what we need. What we need here is a plant which works as part of a greater whole, in conjunction with its neighbours. It is no longer about treating it as an individual and stimulating the highest number of flowers. We have to ask, 'does it sit well with its neighbours'? It will only do that if it looks natural. Obviously, I am excluding structural topiary from this. I am approaching this from the point of view of a garden that is laid out on a formal structure with informal planting billowing out from within that. If you prune your Philadelphus as the rule book states, you will cut off all the arching tips that bow towards the ground, leaving the beginnings of that arching curvature cut off in their prime, and topped by very strong vertical growth which couldn't look more unnatural. I used to go totally against the recommendations of the experts on this. I would remove many of the parts I was supposed to leave, and leave the bits that should have ended up in the shredder. The result was a more natural looking plant which still carried plenty of flowers the next year, but which looked more normal and more comfortable in the border for a much longer time. And don't forget when you have finished to look at the border as a whole. Your pruning work will have changed the height and spread of your plant, and its relation with the plants around it will have changed. In the interest of border harmony, they may now also need work, regardless of what the pedants will say about appropriate timing or methods. Take an instinctive, whole-border approach to your labours and you will end up with a much better garden. And people will not understand what it is about your methods that make your work look better than theirs. They will just know that they have seen something different, something considered, something artistic. Not a vision of rule-book savagery with an eye only on the science and ignoring the beauty.
The other mistake far too many people make, regardless of which of the above less than desirable techniques they employ, is that they fail to make the right decision about how far to cut back. If the plant is hanging over the lawn, making it difficult to mow, almost invariably they cut it back to the edge of the lawn. What's wrong with that, you may ask? Well, it's quite elementary, Watson. The immediate response of a pruned plant is to replenish itself with even more vigour, so no sooner have you turned your back, than the plant is infringing again, and you begin to get impatient, believing this to be a never-ending curse that plagues you for the whole year. It's the sort of thing that makes people who don't know enough about it hate gardening. The answer is simple. You must cut back much further than the space you have mentally allotted to your plant. You must shape it beautifully with carefully considered cuts, and you must make a space for the plant to grow into, not hack it back to the edge of the space it is supposed to fill, leaving it no alternative but to outgrow itself immediately.
Everybody starts their pruning too late. If you want a plant to be six feet tall, prune it when it gets there, not when it is already nine feet. This allows you more choices of potential cuts to create a natural shape, because the bush is less obscured and entangled. You can see what you are doing. Pruning should never be a rescue exercise in a well-managed garden. It should only ever be used as a means to create the work of art. It is a sculptural practice, not remedial. It should make your garden look better, not worse.
It is a difficult balance, and when you inherit a garden where all the planting distances have been set wrong, it is a constant battle. The photograph below shows what some borders grew back to after pruning. They were now ready for their next reduction. Note that the obelisk used as an eye-catcher at the end of the avenue of lime trees is almost obscured, and so we had to lift the crowns of the trees as well, before the vista worked once more.
The pruning we did to arrive at that effect resulted in the borders looking like this, which clearly shows how the view through the trees should work, helped, of course, by the clarity arising from the absence of winter foliage. Note the straight edges of the lawn directing the gaze.
To arrive at the pruned stage above, it is necessary to recognise the problem early enough. We did not have this luxury. Below is what we had to contend with. I used to show these last two pictures as before and after when giving slide shows, and I was always astounded by how many gasps of approval the second picture received, from audiences who were clearly blinded to the state of collapse of some of the shrubs, and the lack of direction the wandering grass path forced upon the view. They just liked the pretty flowers. Sorry, you people. It's about so much more than that!
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