We have a picture hanging on a wall at home painted by Roger Fry about the time of the first world war and entitled ‘Pruning Trees’.
We have a picture hanging on a wall at home painted by Roger Fry about the time of the first world war and entitled ‘Pruning Trees’. He portrays two men, one of whom is cutting off a very large bough from an apple tree, while the other is pulling the bough with a rope. Every winter, before I go out into the orchard to do my own apple pruning, I study it carefully, since I feel I need to remind myself what a highly regarded activity pruning has always been. I expect this is because it is a physical activity, like sex and cricket, which largely depends for its success on what goes on in the head.
I cannot think of many gardening activities which demand quite such a range of cerebral attributes, such as good spatial awareness, visual discernment, and aesthetic sense, as well as a grounding in basic botany, entomology and plant pathology. It is helpful, of course, also to have patience, forbearance and a muscular forearm, but carefully thinking through what you are doing matters more.
The very word ‘pruning’ puts gardeners in a spin. But it would be hard to argue that these characteristics are not common to many keen gardeners, and all that is often lacking are experience and confidence. And they should know that even professional gardeners admit to going back to the books from time to time to check the precise way to prune a particular plant, especially if pruning also encompasses training against a wall.
No doubt Roger Fry’s pruners were hired men, and may well have grumbled at the cold, the long hours and the poor pay. But for private gardeners, like you and me, winter pruning of apple trees should be one of the most pleasurable of garden tasks, from the moment you pile on the clothes on a crisp morning and then take the tools out of the shed. Pocket knife, secateurs, ‘Grecian’ curved saw and loppers have been developed and refined over centuries, to the point where it is hard to imagine they could be improved upon. Knowing that you are at the end of a long, respectable tradition is a pleasure in itself.
Successful fruit pruning depends on appreciating fully why you do it at all: namely, to promote healthy, balanced growth and good flowering and fruiting. To do that, you need to understand a basic feature of most plants, namely the propensity to ‘apical dominance’. This is a fancy phrase for the imperative urge of a bud on a shoot to break into growth, if the shoot is cut just above it. Plant hormones encourage the apical bud to ‘break’, while suppressing the ‘axillary’ buds below it. So we can control where buds break (to a great extent, at least) by being very precise where we make our cuts.
The other thing you need to know is that ‘hard’ pruning (by which we mean drastic pruning that removes a great deal of the growth that was made the year before) encourages vigorous growth the following season since, in woody plants, roots are roughly in balance with the top growth. Cutting back hard the end of shoots, therefore, means that what is left will be encouraged by root activity to grow strongly. Armed with this information, and a copy of a comprehensive manual like the illustrated RHS Pruning and Training by Christopher Brickell and David Joyce, you might just find that pruning apple and pear trees becomes one of the more compelling reasons to spend time outside in the winter garden. Think about it.
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