Pruning, Training, and Tidying: Bob's Basics

Introduction

Most books on pruning, although worthy and well intentioned, are counsels of perfection for the professional gardener, scholars, or growers for show. Rarely is the advice about what you can leave to its own devices; it also doesn’t indicate what you should do and what is optional care.

This book contains the simplest basics you need to know so you can prune those common fruits and ornamentals found in most gardens. Rather than demanding scrupulous attention to correct methods, the following chapters are about how not to prune too much, how to do less pruning, and how to get fair results for the very least pruning, or, put simpler still, it’s all about what you can get away with.

Having a garden inevitably involves some pruning. This could be done with little thought, as most shrubs and fruit trees recover fairly well anyway, or it can be done by the book, with you becoming almost obsessive, micro-controlling each plant in tortured bondage. But which book? Merely from curiosity it might be interesting to compare competing methods for just pears, roses, or grapes—any one of which could keep you occupied for life with whole shelves of books devoted to minute permutations.

Espalier pears make the productive ornamental

The flushes of soft new shoots arising from the horizontal tiers are best simply sheared back once or more times from early summer on

And therein lies the problem: most of us do not have enough time to learn these highest pruning skills, nor, often, do we start with a clean slate and virgin plants. Most gardeners do not start a garden from scratch but inherit a motley collection of neglected plants from previous incumbents. Few are dedicated specialists wishing to fine-tune a particular plant to perfection or enter their productions in competition. For these specialists there are those countless books and methods to peruse; most gardeners just need to prune plants to keep them confined within their limited space—in the hope that they will still get flowers and fruits, despite their attentions, or lack of.

Time is always short and we may not even know the names of the varieties we are faced with, let alone their appropriate treatment; of course we would all like to do a proper job, but if that is going to be too hard a task, better we do the next best thing.

To be fair, with generalizing, some errors will occur—some plants will not get exactly the best treatment—but even completely inappropriate pruning will rarely kill a plant unless it is repeated over and over again. So this book is about how you can get away with doing the least strenuous, rather than the most perfectionist, pruning.

NB: Although essentially a light job, it’s best to prune with a friend—first in case of an accident, second because the work is easier if one cuts while another disposes of the trash, and third because a second pair of eyes may prevent some glorious mistakes.

Pruning and training—why?

In an ideal world we would not need to prune, but nature left to itself is not always as we would want it. We certainly must prune away dead and damaged wood to stop it infecting further, and it’s reasonable to remove anything looking ugly. We may prune hoping to encourage more prolific flowering or to maintain regular crops of better-quality fruits than we would get otherwise. Large-growing trees and shrubs may need pruning to keep them down to a more appropriate size, especially if we foolishly put them somewhere too small. We may prune plants to certain shapes, for our own reasons, that would not so grow without our interventions—particularly to create flat forms to fit against walls.

To do all this we do no more than remove unwanted shoots and train others to our design. Basically, pruning and training is all about redirecting growth—getting the plant to put shoots, leaves, flowers, or fruits where we want them. But it’s also often a case of squeezing more from less; to fit more plants in an area only big enough for far fewer. Pruning also often compensates for past errors of inadequate planning and inappropriate positioning.

In every case, and for whatever reason, pruning needs to be cunningly performed. For, with all pruning, it’s not what you remove that’s important but how what you have left will grow back in a few months’ time.

Reducing the need for pruning

If you had enough space, you could let every plant reach its natural height and spread in whatever shape it chose to grow. However, often our garden space is very limited and we want to squeeze in more plants than good sense would allow. We then hope to control their growth sufficiently to keep them in that confined space and still get flowers or fruits from them. So, although we want plenty of healthy growth in the early years of a tree or shrub’s life, we really do not want it to continue so vigorously forever—particularly as we are then forced to cut off so much surplus growth.

Thus, ensuring plentiful fertility and water are essential initially, but in a plant’s mature years it is wiser to be more frugal; the more you feed and water it, the more it will grow. Of course, competition from everything else will help, and if that is also for light, then be warned: your beloved plants will become lanky and drawn if they are shaded by others. When undertaking pruning, let the light in first; do not prune one or two plants back hard leaving others