Apollo in woods at Veddw. Copyright Charles Hawes

Financial Times

Seeing the Wood for the Trees by Anne Wareham

The best thing to happen to our garden this year was the removal of a telegraph pole. This was exciting because it was the last on a list of several obstacles that needed to go in order to effect a magical transformation.

The others we had removed, more controversially, were trees. I'm afraid these were perfectly good trees, doing no one any harm. But they did ruin one of the most delightful features of the garden, a magnificent semicircle of mature trees which surround the south side. This lovely backdrop tended not to be admired or noticed. It creates a strong horizontal line, but when we first came to live here several large trees within the, garden broke it up. They went first. Then three trees within the semicircle went because they had all developed an unfortunate drunken lurch; the odd angles of their trunks created a distracting pattern among the others. Finally, the telegraph pole went. This was vertical enough, but too much in the foreground. With its removal the whole space opened up. This year, for the first time, visitors have commented on the way the line of trees enfolds the garden.I am aware that this will rub salt into the wounds of those who have tree preservation orders to contend with.

But it is not only trees that can create dramatic lines. For several weeks this summer I repeatedly noticed a large horizontal spread of purple sage which had come well through the winter and was looking splendid. There were several bronze fennels growing at its edges, which made a good colour combination. But one day I acknowledged that I found this group irritating because the vertical line of the fennel ruined the broad flat sweep of the sage.

I felt the same reluctance I had felt about the trees it seems hard to weed out a perfectly healthy, thriving plant. But the deed once done produced immediate gratification.It appears to me that nature often gets her lines wrong. Natural effects are held in high esteem, in theory, and the classic example held to be the bluebell wood in spring. I have noticed, however, that nature will frequently spoil her handiwork by allowing one piece of bramble to reach airily for the sky, thus with one wave ruining the view of a total carpet of flower. Likewise, I have to weed seedling elders and hollies out of the cover of ivy in the wood because their vertical line ruins the otherwise pleasing uninterrupted horizontal.

So now that I am aware of the joys of removal, I periodically venture into the garden with a pair of loppers in one hand and secateurs in the other. I'm looking for lines. Following a hint on these pages many years ago, I hid our neighbour's house with a line of laurels, which have grown lustily, as predicted. In their case, I have removed parts of their lower extremities. I resented the space they took up at ground level, so conceived the idea of allowing them to hedge out at the back, while at the front I cleaned their trunks of all the small branches and leaves which came, of this hedge line. I worked up to about head height, where I allow them to branch out, like small trees. This cutting has produced a most satisfying line of sinuous trunks, a pleasing feature in their own right all year round. This is a good trick, too, for making space where a shrub has been planted too close to a path.

Astrantia Hadspen Blood. © Charles Hawes

Creating a few trunks at the edge of the path, and allowing them to branch into an elegant arch overhead, is much more satisfactory than hacking the shrub right back. Pruning a shrub this way can turn it into a small tree, useful where space forbids a tree, or where more space on the ground is needed for planting. I made a pretty tree out of a cut leaved elder, exposing a ruggedly attractive bark in the process.

But this process can become addictive. You can suddenly find yourself trunk crazy, and prowl around everywhere looking for elegant shapes to expose. It is as well to bear in mind that it can be easier to chop a branch off than to put it back, so think hard, look hard, before you do the deed. It is an addiction which will allow you to appreciate the beauty good lines can create in a garden. Lollipop trees rising cleanly away from the stark horizontal of a clipped hedge, the anarchic twiggy wiggle of the inside of a hornbearn tunnel, a line of stunted pollards.

One of the least sung pleasures of the gardening year is the stripping away of all the flowery debris in the autumn to expose the bones of the garden beneath, creating a fresh new vision providing you have done your lines.

Published in the Financial Times, date lost