Broadcaster John Cushnie hates the 'girlie' approach to pruning, writes Jane Powers
Listening to the gardener, broadcaster and writer John Cushnie is like inhaling a breath of fresh air. Actually, it's more like being hit broadside by a bracing gale of opinion and obduracy. But that's fine with me. In a world where people edit their every word before it leaves their brain, Cushnie's uncensored talk is refreshing. Political correctness and contemporary gardening ideas are shredded and blown away by his utterances, which are articulated in an expressive, nonsense-dismissing Northern Irish accent.
The Co Down man, who has gardened since he was a teenager, in the 1950s, is unashamedly traditionalist. Many of today's garden trends he finds incomprehensible or laughable: steel structures in gardens, ornamental grasses, ferns, wildlife gardening, meadow gardening, naturalistic prairie planting and gardeners who were never taught to dig. In truth, he has little time for much that deviates from the old school of horticulture, when there was only one right way of doing things - and woe betide the man who did it any other way.
But that is fine, too, because there are some aspects of gardening you need an iron fist to guide you through. Pruning, for instance. There are right ways of pruning and wrong ways of pruning. One of the most common of the latter is what Cushnie calls "girlie snipping", where the person wielding the secateurs snips busily around the outer bits of a tree or shrub without making any inroads into the core of the plant. "When you go back next year your plant is twice as big, with twice as many stems and twice as many in the wrong place." (Every instance of such girlish activity that I've witnessed in recent years has been carried out by full-grown men, but never mind that.)
To protect the trees and shrubs of these islands from such crimes, Cushnie has written a book, called, simply, How to Prune, which follows on his other successful guides, How to Propagateand How to Garden, and a trio of books on trees, shrubs and groundcover.
Cushnie is a hands-on and vastly experienced gardener: he has run his own design and landscaping business in Co Down for 30 years and has been a regular broadcaster, on both radio and television, for decades, including as a panellist on BBC Radio 4's Gardeners' Question Timesince 1996 and as presenter of BBC Northern Ireland's television show Greenmount Gardenfor the past three years.
Of all the tasks one faces in a garden, pruning most fills the heart with fear and confusion. The essential point to remember, counsels Cushnie, is that pruning promotes growth. As he writes in the book: "Fortunately, plants differ from humans in that when a limb is removed several more will grow to replace it."
One of the reasons that this magical feat occurs is because pruning usually disrupts apical dominance. This means that the bud at the apex, or tip, of a shoot produces hormones that inhibit lower buds from developing, making the apical bud the most vigorous, or dominant. Therefore, when you prune out a shoot, a stem or a branch, the lower parts of the plant suddenly receive a message to grow. And, as Cushnie says, several more new bits will grow in the place of the one you removed. (This explains, by the way, why a rush of twiggy new growth is the consequence of "girlie snipping" - where grown men who should know better trim off loads of little shoots. Hedge-clipping, you might say, is girlie pruning with a purpose.)
Pruning should be approached with manly determination, courage and a critical eye. You need to decide why you're pruning before you set about a plant: it might be to shape it, to rejuvenate it after years of neglect, to remove dead or diseased branches, to take out old and unproductive wood (that is, bits that are too tired to flower and fruit with any conviction) or, in the case of some shrubs, such as willows and dogwoods with coloured bark, to promote a flush of new, brightly pigmented stems.
Once you know why you're doing it, you can be more confident and produce a better result. Cushnie's book certainly has all the requisite information: when, where and how to prune; as well as a directory of several hundred plant species explaining the needs of each one. His editor and publisher insisted that every instruction was completely comprehensible and unambiguous, so that the idea of pruning should no longer be so scary for many of us. "We have to knock this idea on the head," emphasises Cushnie. "If people weren't so frightened they'd have better gardens."
How to Prune is published by Kyle Cathie, £19.99 in UK
Diary Date
Tomorrow, 11am The Irish Garden Plant Society is holding its annual sale, at Parish Hall, Our Lady of Dolours Church, Glasnevin, Dublin 9. Come early for unusual and rare plants.