It's pruning time. Again. Whoopsie Doopsie Doo!

There are always jobs in the garden that you hate having to do.  Many of them are necessary and you reap rewards later in the year for doing them now - but that does not mean you have to do them without a quiet curse and no small touch of resentment.  For me, this time has come again, for nothing says "Happy New Year" in the garden quite like the pruning of the wisteria and the annual cull of the apple tree.  For this means that I have to climb my ladder again.  And I hate - absolutely hate - heights.  But I'm too tight to pay out to get someone else to do it.  My unfortunate neighbour spent the weekend listening to various unpleasentness-es as I attempted to negotiate the front of my house trying to work out how to get the wisteria into shape, from the quiet squawks as the ladder shifted on its not-too-secure base, to the outright scream as one of the wispy leaders caught me in the eye.  Nothing says "macho pruner" quite as much as frankly girly squeals from a grown man trying to secateur at height, even if that height cannot be more than eight feet above the ground.  Dear reader, for someone like me, it feels more like eighty.  I have, after all, been rescued from a snowfield by two eighteen year old girls after freezing in fear at the height of the area, which was not half as much fun as it might sound.

It would, of course, be gratifying if I knew how to prune the things properly in the first place.  There is a Bramley in the back garden  that must be close to 40 years old.  My books - and I have many - tell me how to identify and prune a tip bearer, or a spur bearer.  My Bramley is, naturally, a "partial tip bearer", which  also "fruits on its spurs".  How helpful.  My pruning does rather look like a slash-and-cut operation, no matter what the intention may have been at the start.

As for pruning the Wisteria, the formal advice seems to be never ending and always presented as though it is all so easy.  If it were, though, why would there be so many articles on it? Apparently, you summer prune it after flowering to keep the whippy growth under control - you did do this last year, didn't you?  No, me neither!  I'm not going up that ladder twice if I can help it.  And then, in January, when it is cold and raining, and the ladder is slippery and the day is miserable, get up into the clouds again and take the stems back to the first few fat buds.  And then try to cram the prunings into the little brown bin that we can get from the council, that has spent Christmas empty and now seems far too small to be of any practical use.

So why do it? Why climb the ladder, shivering in fear every moment that I am off the ground? Because, of course, when the apple or the wisteria does flower, it is glorious and a thing of pride, and I know that it has done so only because I did the job when I really, really didn't want to.  Even though, I have come to suspect, the wisteria is one of those varieties that really doesn't care  about how it is pruned, but will always bloom prolifically since it is placed in a fully south facing position.  Of course, I didn't tell the Australian visitor that last year, when she stopped and congratulated me, taking photos of "her favourite plant" and the "spectacular show" that mine was apparently putting on.  You may assure yourselves that, just at that moment, it was all down to me and my hard work - and I remembered that feeling as I was at the top (or at least nearly half way up) the ladder this year, clinging to the stonework and the wisteria boughs, hoping that the rather thin stems would hold me up if the worst happened.

So remember, now is the time to get that wisteria, the apple trees and the roses under control, assuming that you don't need a snorkel to get to them in the first place after all the rain of the last few weeks.  But if you are going up that ladder, please be very, very careful!