I still find it a priviledge to work in the gardens of Ludlow - the great and the glorious, the humble and homely. A garden is a very personal space and to be trusted to help care for that space can be an honour.

And satisfying too - the climbing roses that I will be pruning this month, I prune for maximum flowering in the following season. So when they burst forth with a mass of scented blooms right on cue, I can think, “Yup, job well done.”

I love the discipline of pruning and tying in a climbing rose. It can be both frustrating and slightly lacerating, but that’s my own fault as this is the one job I can’t do wearing gloves. (Don’t try this at home kids!) It’s worth it though, as the resulting framework neatly trained against a wall or over an arch, will not only produce good and plentiful flowers, but be pleasing to see over the barren winter months.

Believe it or not, but I have over 200 roses in my care - from the highly scented old roses such as the Gallicas and Damasks to the rampant ramblers such as ‘Paul’s Himalayan Musk’ and ‘Rambling Rector’. There are some great names out there - how about ‘Tipsy Imperial Concubine’ and ‘The Ingenious Mr Fairchild’.

It’s not only roses that can be pruned to perfection, but pruning anything remotely shrub and tree-like can be quite daunting if you don’t know how or when. Plants can be very forgiving, but if you unwittingly snip off all the growth that will produce next season’s flowers… well, that’s it. Complaints about a certain shrub which is supposed to be smothered  with gorgeous, aromatic blossom, yet hasn’t produced a single flower for years, can often simply be put down to pruning at the wrong time.

There can also be that one mistaken snip and it’s “Oops!”, or some such word depending on how highly the plant is valued, and it’s too late. There’s no sticking it back. What’s done is done. Then again, you could do a ‘Rab C Nesbitt’ of the horticultural world and scrape the equivalent of a few strands of hair over the perfectly hairless scalp. See? It can be disguised - to a degree. As I mentioned earlier, plants can be very forgiving - and what the eye doesn’t see…

Footnote to my customers - just kidding!