Thursday 11 June 2015

summer pruning

Today I pruned the Paulownia in the rose bed.  This is an experiment, and at the moment it looks so awful and was so difficult to do that I'm not sure it's a project that's working or that I'll repeat, but that's how one learns in gardening.  The trouble was that it was a fair way towards developing into a tree.  There was not supposed to be a tree in the rose bed or that close to the house, as it would shade the roses and block the view, and Paulownia can get large in time.  Before they die, that is. There used to be one in the Beth Chatto garden when I started visiting twenty years ago, but it's not there now.

I grew the Paulownia from seed.  I planted several in the rose bed, intending to manage them as coppice and thinking that their big, dramatic leaves would provide a lift to the itsy bitsy leaves of the roses.  They started suckering after a few years, so by now I have more than enough.  Then one year I missed cutting down one hard to reach stem, and the following year I saw it had produced some flower buds and didn't have the heart to cut them down, and things went from there.  I enjoyed the flowers this year.  They are quite like a bluish foxglove, though not a true blue, held in erect panicles, and because the back garden slopes away from the house we could look straight at them from the veranda and see them outlined against a background of mature trees at the bottom of the garden instead of staring upwards trying to see blue flowers against a blue sky.

So that was jolly nice, but I was left with the matter of a tree rapidly pushing the twenty foot mark in the middle of the rose bed.  Last year I said I was going to cut it down, then I began to wonder if I could merely reduce it, and manage it as a lollipop shrub over the top of the roses.  That would be fun, as it flowers before the roses are doing anything and was attractive, if only it would have stayed at its present size and not kept growing.  I meant to prune it the moment the flowers had faded, to give it as much time as possible to recover, but it looked like a tricky job and I had lots of other things that needed doing, so I didn't get round to it.  Until today.

I managed to wriggle in to the centre of the bed with the long handled loppers, negotiating my way carefully around rose 'William Lobb'.  He is falling over again, and this winter I should try and build him a wooden tripod like Major Grahame uses at Dawes Hall.  He has a very fine collection of shrub roses, by the way, and a trip to Bures on a day when his garden is open would be worth anyone's while at this time of the year.  I cut back some of the lower branches using the loppers, with difficulty since everything kept getting tangled up in 'William Lobb', but some of the taller ones defeated me.  They were too high, too vertical, and I thought I wanted to cut back to main branches which I hoped would send out strong new shoots, not tip back the entire tree.

With great difficulty I manoeuvred the step ladder into the bed, and laboriously sawed through each branch in turn, wishing I had a third arm so that I could hold on to the saw, hold on to the main trunk so as not to fall off the stepladder, and break the fall of each branch as they crashed down on to the roses and Angelica gigas below.  Amazingly, there was no major damage, but I could see why gardens featuring pollarded trees in the middle of a tangle of shrub roses are thin on the ground.  I managed to get the step ladder out again without breaking anything, and without losing my pruning saw in the undergrowth, and stepped back to survey the result of my efforts.

It looks pitiful.  I left some leaves lower down, but the top part is a stump.  I did wonder as I was working whether I should leave cutting through the leader until autumn because it would look so drastic, but the point of the exercise was to try and get fresh growth from lower down, at a level where I would be able to reach to prune it in future years.  I realised as I considered my handiwork that one problem with the plan was that it left an almost leafless and mutilated trunk sticking up out of the bed just at the moment when the roses were reaching their peak.  Somehow the eye accepts drastic pruning more easily in November or February when most things are leafless and looking half dead than in June when everything else is burgeoning.

On the other hand, next year I might be able to deal with the regrowth using the pole lopper (assuming it makes any regrowth and doesn't simply concentrate its efforts on throwing a new shoot from ground level) and I might be able to shape it to something more reasonable, and now I've spotted the problem with it detracting from the rose display I could make sure I tackle it the moment the flowers are fading.  And then it might look fine, foxglove flowers and then an unobtrusive largish leaved lollipop small tree hovering unobtrusively above the roses.  I really don't know, but that's part of the fun of gardening, experimenting.

While I had the ladder and saws out I pruned a large hazel branch, dead in places, that was growing up into the Arbutus x andrachnoides at the edge of the wood.  It turned out to be a bit of a job, finding a spot where the ladder would stand without tipping, which didn't place me under the branch I was cutting.  Our Ginger came to see what I was doing, and I ended up having to lock him in the study so that I wouldn't accidentally drop the branch on him. Then the branch twisted as I got to the last inch or so, and took me ages to saw through the final section.  I kept thinking I must be almost through by now, and even went and fetched a rope to go over it so that I could give it a good tug to bring it down, but it wasn't budging.  Eventually it came down with a crash, and I was glad the cat was safely locked indoors.  He was very huffy when I let him out, rushed to his food dish, and then wouldn't speak to me for at least half an hour.

After that it was child's play trimming two birch branches that were starting to dangle down into the crown of a camellia, apart from the fact that to reach them I had to clamber up the pile of builder's debris by the conservatory through a large prostrate juniper, which turned out to contain a bramble and a dead pigeon.  Still, the Arbutus and the camellia both look better for being given some air space, and I've managed to keep the natural shape of the hazel and the birch so that you wouldn't notice they had been pruned.

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