The garden in winter, stripped of its finery and laid bare to the world, can be a stark place. But there’s a beauty to that. Whether it’s silvered seed heads of summer flowers, the weblike strands remaining of the pumpkin plant or the recently clipped hedge, what’s left in winter says a lot about the bones of a garden. And a garden that sings in the darker months is quite a balm for the winter blues.
There are many plants that shine in winter and whole books on the subject. However, the best gardens don’t rely on winter blooms and berries alone, but the structure of the plants too. This is often achieved through pruning and training to create a shrub or tree layer that shapes the garden. The obvious choice here is box and yew. The cool, clean lines of box balls and low hedges, the whimsy of peacock topiary or the stark, dark backdrop of a yew hedge around a border are all classics for a reason.
There is another sort of winter pruning — that of deciduous shrubs and trees. Gardener Jenny Barnes, whose work can be seen at the likes of Cottesbrooke Hall and Gardens, in Northamptonshire, and Asthall Manor, Oxfordshire, is known for her extraordinary work that takes pruning roses to a whole new level.
Her careful eye and incredible patience allow her to bend ramblers and climbers into billowing organic shapes that coil and arch like serpents or curve around walls in rococo shapes. Sometimes she’ll take several roses together to weave into giant orbs in the border.
The results are quite something, not just because of the dedication, but because they are fleeting; to be enjoyed over winter before the summer leaves give them a shaggy hairstyle. There are other benefits to all this manipulation: every time the stem is bent, it pushes hormones from the underside of the stem upwards, resulting in more flowers.
This painstaking work — each stem must be tied numerous times to manipulate the shape — “is not for everyone”, says Barnes. “It takes a lot of patience: it hurts, it is cold and it takes forever, but I do believe anyone can do it.” She has a few tricks for those prepared to give it a go: don’t overload the plants. “If you double up then the bottom layer will get shaded out in summer and die off,” she says.
Rambling roses are preferred “because they offer the best flexibility and lots of whippy growth so there’s plenty to work with”, she says. “Climbers can work but you’re more limited, particularly if they are the David Austin sort with very thick stems.” Soft new growth is best, so it might make sense to prune an older rambler hard for the first year in order to maximise new growth.
“If you’re terrified of pruning, you really don’t have to be, you can’t kill a rose by pruning it,” she says. If it doesn’t do well one year, just be more sparing the next.
Barnes starts the process by removing any leaves still left on the rose so that she can see the entire structure. Next, she cuts back any stems that are the size of a knitting needle or less to two buds. Then start untangling. “You have to be guided by the roses,” she says. “Each stem will tell you the direction it wants to go in.” Keep plenty of space between each stem, says Barnes, and trim any side shoots: “You end up with something very tight and smooth, but still sculptural.”
Roses may require patience, but the end result can be achieved in a day or two. Pruning fruit trees to reach the same artistic heights takes a lot longer, a decade or so, but it is worth it for something that can accentuate the bare bones of winter, while still hinting at the bucolic nature of summer with all those fat buds, says Sylvia Travers. “It’s like giving a garden really good cheekbones,” she jokes.
Travers oversaw the construction and planting of the Paradise and kitchen walled gardens at RHS Bridgewater, in Salford, which has a lot of walls to cover in fruit.
“It is still a bit of a dark art,” she says. “Many people dabble in vegetable growing, but training trees is still a mystery to many.” Travers, who is a tutor at West Dean College, in West Sussex, wants to change that. “There’s an enormous amount of skill, but also satisfaction that goes into this sort of pruning.”
Travers is adamant that you can’t buy the end-product and it has to be created in the garden. Fruit trees can be trained against walls, fences and trellises into “fans”, where branches form a fan out from a low trunk; “espaliers”, where the branches are horizontal; and “cordons”, where branches are clipped very close to a tall, straight trunk.
There is also the simpler “step-over”, which Travers suggests starting with — a short trunk not more than 50cm high with a single long horizontal branch either side, so that it forms a low fence. It’s excellent for smaller gardens and it will fruit within two or three years from training as a maiden.
She also recommends a “Belgian fence”, where a trellis of intertwined trees creates a diagonal lattice — “actually quite simple to achieve, but this is hidden by its seemingly complex appearance,” she says.
If you want to be seen as a serious gardener, though, then Travers says you have to go for a “statuesque” espalier: “the classic for a walled garden”. But don’t disregard the simpler fan shape, which works best for stone fruit that “won’t espalier well”.
This shape also works for soft fruit. “If you’ve got a low wall that you can’t do much with, particularly if it’s north facing, then you could try gooseberries,” says Travers. However, the one she loves best — she says it is not for the faint-hearted — uses the French Lepage system where the end result is a line of tree that looks like a wave or shell pattern.
Books can teach you a lot, but this sort of pruning is really best learnt from a master. Travers teaches day courses on the basics of fruit growing and training at West Dean College. Courses start in early January — a perfect new year’s resolution, perhaps, learning the art of a clipped form.
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