It is Spring. All is pruned back.
We’re cutting down the shrubberies and the budgets.
Gone is the gluttony of yore.
We exercise until we look like skeletons.
I age five years
each time I dig into my wallet
but when the spring sun shines
I become young!
(Det er forår. Alting klippes ned.
Der beskæres i buskadser og budgetter.
Slut med fordums fede ødselhed.
Vi begynder at træne til skeletter.
Jeg blir fem år ældre
ved hvert indgreb i min pung,
men når forårssolen skinner,
blir jeg ung!)
The above is the first verse of a song written by the Danish poet Benny Andersen. As a child I never quite understood it, because surely Spring should be about growth, and cutting back would be in autumn!
But as we all know it isn’t. There are last years spent perennials, of course, and the roses and the fruit trees. And later in the spring the forsythia and other spring-flowering shrubs.
The night frost has returned, and it looks like it will continue on and off for at least a fortnight, so my spring header on the blog mainly celebrates the calendar spring; it’s very difficult to see in the garden, except for the snowdrops and the winter aconites, but then they’re only harbingers of Spring, not Spring itself!
I also took a series of “before” shots of my pruning targets for this weekend, and I will upload them together with “after” shots in a later blog entry. Please do not mock me; I may be inexperienced at pruning, but any pruning is better than no pruning, right?
Thanks for sharing the poem. Spring is definitely in full swing here however we are going to have a very cold night this week. I am a little worried.
At 8:30 AM this morning it was still minus 5C outside, so it was pretty cold here, too. (And this afternoon the ice still hasn’t melted from the water butt behind the annex!)
Still, there are snowdrops and crocuses and aconites. And a plumb wood pigeon strutting around on the lawn, no doubt feasting on something it’s not meant to eat, because that seems to be what wildlife does around here.
Love the poem…I am terrible at pruning…we have had snow and ice and cold mixed with warm days between. My pond ice is receding and the earliest crocus are finally fully braving the warmth of today…even a winter aconite is showing…but it is few and far between still…
We had a decidedly spring-like week, but last night the frost returned and the forecast is for frost on most nights for the next fortnight.
My aconites are few and far between as well, but that’s because there weren’t any here when I took over the custodianship of this plot of land less than two years ago. Since then it seems I’ve added some aconites by accident whenever I’ve planted a clump of perennials from my parents’ garden, where they grew all over the place. In a few years I’m sure my garden will have plenty of them!
(I’m “cheating” with the crocuses, though; some are from my parents’ garden, but most are from bulbs I planted last year. Still, I guess I can’t create a garden purely from heirlooms…)
It has been a beautiful spring week here but has turned cold and sleety once more but this is to be expected at this time of year as the weather is making up its mind which season to be. I think pruning is one of those things that comes with practice. I’m still practising but getting better with each year and gaining more confidence.
I threw myself at the fruit trees with some confidence, since my grandfather had an apple plantation and I know what the trees should end up looking like in 15 years, but then I got a severe case of stage fright when facing the roses, so I think I will have to go over them again and be a bit harder.
And the weather does what it wants in these spring months, and we’ll just have to make the best of it. It was quite decent this weekend, though Friday night was very cold.
So true, and it is so hard to cut back enough (sometimes… and then you have our wild rabbits cutting back a bit too much). But today my mom showed me her rose pruning and it was a very light haircut indeed. She always hates to remove things from the garden.
We don’t have rabbits, but the slugs will eat just about anything…
I will go over the roses again next weekend, especially the rosa multiflora rambler at the North end of the house; it’s tumbling all over the place and needs to learn some discipline the hard way. (As does the forsythia, but not until it has bloomed.)
And nothing should be removed from my garden, except flowers for friends and family (and myself); prunings go in the pile of twigs and branches and will be used as kindling once fully dry. (And the ashes then returned to the garden whence it came…)
Hello there : )
I enjoyed that poem , thank you !
Never worry about how you prune .. it will come to you by instinct and even if mistakes are made the plants don’t mind a bad haircut .. they will come back to themselves no worries there !
Our weather has been so unusual I can’t even accept it myself .. next to no snow .. so our ground water will have no refreshing Spring water nourishing the earth and our many lakes in this area .. but we will get through it and garden on ! LOL
Joy
I think I know more or less how I want the plants to look once I’m done pruning, so it’s mainly a question of daring to cut them that far back.
Still, it’s not rocket science, and I’ve made a good start last weekend. If I cut a little at the time and keep the position of the buds in mind, I know I can’t go too far wrong.
Our water table being so high (there’s rarely more than half a meter beneath the lawn to the water table, and most often significantly less than that!) I don’t think I will ever have to worry about droughts, rather the opposite. But the first year we had the garden it flooded because of the rain, so we now have a good drain in place that keeps the top dry but the soil will always remain moist, even on the hottest summer days.