9 January

This, though it maybe doesn’t look it, is a cherry tree. An ornamental. It had to be butchered late last year to make room to install new guttering, which you can see above it. All of its major limbs were sawn off. I thought that would probably kill it, but almost straight away epicormic growth started from the surviving bark. Trees are incredibly adaptable and can be grown into a whole range of different forms. The most commonly known are things like coppicing, espaliering, and pollarding. But I wondered, could I turn this cherry tree into a cherry bush, which would suit that space much better than the usual sprawling large limbs of a tree? I did a bit of reading and actually that was a very popular approach, historically in formal gardens. So that’s my experiment now, quite a bit of judicious pruning to get it into a bush shape. I think it’s going OK.