PHOTOS: SARAH CUTTLE; TIM SANDALL; PAUL DEBOIS LOCATION: WEST DEAN GARDENS, WEST SUSSEX
The garden during April takes on the most glorious and uplifting green hue, with trees breaking into leaf and fresh shoots, full of promise, emerging from the ground. The surge of growth encourages us to garden with more vim and vigour, and those plants that needed a little more protection and to be left alone during the winter and early spring can now be pruned to embrace the warmer season ahead. Tender plants, such as penstemon, salvia, pittosporum and fatsia, can have any winter-damaged stems removed now to make way for fresh shoots.
Star jasmine (trachelospermum) should also be pruned now because the worst of the winter weather is behind us. A light trim and some gentle shaping to remove frosted shoot tips and wayward stems will make way for healthy growth to carry flowers in the summer. Also, shrubs that we prune hard for coloured stems or dramatic foliage in March, when the sap starts to rise, should be all pruned by this time of the year, as the recovery from that drastic pruning does require the majority of the growing season to form a decent-sized shrub before growth slows in the autumn.