Spring clean your shrubs

With spring soon upon us, Christopher Lloyd suggests that you make sure your shrubs are ‘paying for their keep’

- Christopher Lloyd

ONCE spring is here we shall be inundated with jobs pressing remorselessly for our attention, so before the dormant season is at an end we should take a look at all the shrubs in our garden and decide what attention they need.

Be really critical. So often we hold on to a shrub year after year for no better reason than it has always been with us. It would be much better to get rid of it altogether; it is wonderful for the plantsman, in any but the newest garden, to be presented with a gap. He will pounce on it with some thing or things that he has been longing to find room for.

For example, take that lilac. Are not the blooms miserable compared with what you could have? The chances are that the stock on which it was grafted took over years ago, and you are now being treated with nothing better than wild lilac blossom. Even if the tree is a good variety, it may still need attention.

Go over it with a saw and secateurs, and remove all the weak branches and twigs that are cluttering up the inside of the bush. They will never be strong enough to flower and in the meantime they are keeping out the light and preventing strong young replacement branches from developing.

Hydrangeas and rhododendrons

Is your hydrangea too large for its position? Try cutting out all the oldest branches (these are the longest and most straggly) in the bush right down to ground level. When they have gone, the bush will have a smaller circumference.

Never just shorten branches of hydrangeas, except of Hydrangea paniculata varieties, as you are simply cutting out the flower wood. If, even after the thinning I have suggested, the bush is still too bulky, either scrap it and replace it with a dwarf-growing variety, or else move it to another part of the garden where more space is available.