How to make the cut

Martyn Cox looks at ways to prune shrubs for a great display of winter stems

AS a student at horticultural college, I became used to performing repetitive tasks that were intended to fix routine gardening jobs into the memory of trainee gardeners. Countless seeds were sown in spring, while many hours were spent taking pelargonium cuttings in summer. The arrival of autumn was greeted with dread as it meant days of backbreaking double digging in a field of heavy clay.

After all that toil with a spade, squelching around in claggy soil, late winter offered a respite. It was time to unholster my trusty pair of secateurs and get to grips with some pruning. Huge beds planted with nothing else but roses were tackled, while berberis, cotinus and other deciduous shrubs that had started to outgrow their allotted space were thinned out or brought under control.

However, my favourite plants to tame were the ornamental dogwoods with their brightly coloured stems that grew, cheek​ by jowl, in the beds surrounding almost every college building. Once pruned, the red, yellow, green and sometimes two-tone shoots were gathered up and taken to a classroom to be used as material for hardwood cuttings.

Vivid display of stems

Every plant was given the same treatment by students. Stems were cut back incredibly hard to a permanent framework, leaving a knobbly cluster of stubs just above the ground. The reason for this seemingly brutal approach was twofold – to keep the shrubs compact and to ensure that the plants produced an equally vivid display of stems the following winter.