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The skeleton of the garden is never more starkly revealed than now, in February, just as buds are beginning to fatten and a fresh new covering of leaves becomes something more than the vaguest of future propositions. The last full month of winter and there are decisions to be made, and many of these revolve around the woody stuff. There’s a thicket or two around here that requires attention, or not, and either is fine, but that choice is where the gardening actually happens. I could decide not to do anything about these areas and that, from the outside, would look exactly the same had I just ignored them and avoided the decision altogether, but in one of these scenarios the unruly bits of my garden would flourish by mutual consent, whilst in the other they’d do so in spite of me. Some might see this as a distinction without a difference. To me, it’s what gardening on the brink is all about.
At any rate, there’s a lot of aerial wood that’s calling for the chop, from the tangle of celastrus growing into the bamboo, the ash that needs pollarding, the hazel overhanging my neighbour’s greenhouse and the small forest of lofty damson poles springing up along the northern edge of the garden from the rootstock of the same neighbour’s Victoria plum (a tree that was itself cut down three or four years ago). That’s quite a lot of chopping – although sawing would be more accurate, since that will be the tool of choice. And, though light seems in short supply on this typically gloomy February afternoon, there are few things more enjoyable than carving brightness back into the garden, through the removal of stuff – a misplaced branch, an overgrown canopy, a mass of brambles high up in a shrub that escaped notice when the plants were all in full leaf. It creates a heck of a mess on the ground that all needs processing (thank heaven for the dead hedge), but the space to breathe such operations give to the garden, for the soil to bask in the light, is worth the wintery effort. Plus, it’s a grand way to keep warm.
It’s always worth remembering that winter pruning is rejuvenative, while pruning in summer is reductive. A tree or a shrub remembers exactly how it was when it fell asleep at the beginning of winter; if it wakes up in spring pruned to half the size but with the energy reserves of its former self, it’s likely to make up the difference again in short measure, and then some. But the growth will be young and soft, and easier to control, and our own seasonal pruning activities have their memory, too. We get used the the light, and take care to pare away anything that would hinder its entry.
I still feel very new to this platform, but as far as I’m aware, no one’s yet managed to come up with a catchy portmanteau for the activity of writing a Substack post when you should really be out doing something else. Procrastistacking? As the light begins to fade on Saturday, it feels a bit like that’s what I’m doing, though I remind myself that, in order to garden with both purpose and intent, it helps to record your intentions before you set to. And having now told you all what these are, there’s a level of accountability there, too. Feel free to badger me next week if it looks like I might still be putting the pruning off.
Oooh. I have twenty five apple trees to prune imminently (long story, part of a three year process of restoring an orchard) and I love the idea of them waking up with the memory of what they were! This is lovely.
This is a lovely explanation of how shrubs ‘remember’ how they were