The outstanding winter pruning has begun to feel more urgent. I've been working my way round the garden, but suddenly buds are swelling and breaking and I want to get it finished. I'm quite a lot of the way round the roses. Many of them are shrub or species roses, because I like them, they look right in a fairly wild country garden, and they seem to cope well with light soil or a degree of shade so are versatile plants. With them all I do is remove dead wood and the old, much flowered and branching oldest branches. The plants pretty much tell you what needs to come out. I've learnt to treat the modern shrub roses with a degree of respect. I took 'Sally Holmes' down by a half a few years back, as she'd got much larger than I was expecting, and rather straggly. She hated it, responding with weak regrowth and some dieback, and recovery was slow.
I've taken a badly placed internally crossing branch out of the Zelkova carpinifolia which grows in the lowest part of the garden. I was smitten by the beauty of the bark on a wet day at Wisley years ago, and got one out of a packet of seeds to germinate (which was enough as I only wanted one tree). It was planted out as a youngster in late summer 2001 (not the most obvious time of the year to plant a tree but that must have been when I was doing that part of the garden) and is now about 4m high and wide. From when it was a few cm high it has never wanted to grow vertically, or limit itself to a single trunk, and the books do say that in cultivation they tend to have a very bushy habit. Mine has two main trunks, which are sinuous and a nice shade of amber, plus a third smaller trunk which I think needs to come off, but want to be absolutely sure before making the cut. As they say, you can't put it back afterwards. The badly placed branch snaked around between the two principle ones, and I could see it exerting pressure in all the wrong places and making the crown mechanically unstable as it grew, so it has already come off. The tree should be long lived (unless it succumbs to Dutch elm disease. They are in the elm family and can catch it) but its bushy shape can make it vulnerable to windthrow. I hope ours is sheltered enough to survive. The leaves are toothed and turn a pleasant yellow in the autumn. The gardener at work tells me that our employer doesn't rate zelkovas, dismissively calling them 'bio plants' because they just have green leaves and no exciting features. I can't decide whether on this occasion my tastes are more rarified than those of my boss, or if I'm a sad person to be happy with a dull plant!
I started on the Buddleia davidii today, but didn't finish them. Their leaves are growing by the day, so I don't want them wasting any more energy breaking buds on bits I'm about to prune off. Buddleia davidii are such useful plants. They are fast growing and while not evergreen are in leaf for much of the year, so are good for fast screening, though that's not why I grow them. The butterflies love them, of course. Every now and then customers come into work who have read some magazine or newspaper article about which cultivars are especially attractive to insects, but the butterflies here don't seem that fussy. We have 'Black Knight' below the veranda, which one customer told me was not a good one, but ours were covered in Painted Ladies last year. Buddleia davidii does not seem the most root-firm plant, and I have known them blow out of the ground in very severe gales, but they do also have an amazing capacity to regenerate from the roots.
I had to tackle a row of Hebe topiaria earlier than I would have chosen to. These run in front of one of the decks, and we needed access to the front of the deck to replace it. The reason for having shrubs by the deck was to use foundation planting to anchor the house to the garden, and to cover an awkward sloping bit of lawn that was a pig to mow, and that I was too idle to level. The hebe looked good for about seven years, but had begun to get open and spreading with age, while snow landing on them two winters running hastened their decline. I'm fairly confident that if I feed them up they will reclothe themselves completely from the base. I've done this in the past with Hebe 'Mrs Winder' and it worked OK, though if it hadn't been for the decking I'd have left it another month in case of frosts. I haven't bothered taking cuttings. I went through a period of being very keen on hebes, but am not so enthusiastic as I was seven years ago. I think it's the long slow decline in the shape of the bush from a perfect dome to something less perfect. Nowadays I'd rather have clipped box if I wanted a dome. Some hebes are good bee plants, but H. topiaria is not very floriferous. Given I sound so unenthusiastic about it maybe I ought to take them out! But the roots of a healthy hebe are extremely hard work to shift, and I'm saving my energies for the Rhododendron ponticum in the end of the wood. When those are gone I can have a nice Eucryphia in their place.
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