January – cut!

This is the month when the garden is at its deepest dormancy, and the exuberance of summer feels more distant than ever. As gardeners, out in all weathers, we learn to focus on the good days – when the beauty of winter sees us gratefully breathe in a lungful of icy air and reach for the camera. The soggier, less picturesque moments, when thoughts of "what was so bad about a desk job anyway?" creep in, are best forgotten...

While the garden may be deep in slumber, we are not. This is the month when most of our woody pruning is done – a quiet, methodical task which sees things like roses, shrubs, and fruit trees tidied and prepared to perform at their best in the growing season ahead.

While winter pruning can be done at any point during the colder months, January tends to work best with the Gasper schedule. The run-up to Christmas is usually taken up with jobs like the first tidy of the borders and getting bulbs in the ground. We then hold off on the heavier clearing and mulching until the worst of the winter weather has passed, as working on soggy soil — and walking all over it — does more harm than good.

There is a cacophony of, dare we say it, over-complicated advice about pruning, and whilst, yes, it pays to understand a plant's individual habits, there are also a few basic principles you can't go far wrong with.

Our simple tips for winter pruning:

• Move through the garden, tackling any hardy deciduous woody plants you know to benefit from pruning. This may be for reasons of aesthetics (e.g., thinning out multi-stemmed shrubs to stop them becoming scruffy and thicket-like), keeping the plant to an allotted space (as with things like trained roses and other climbers), or to maintain good health and productivity (e.g., roses and fruit trees).

• Start by taking out any dead, diseased, or badly placed growth, then thin out what remains. As a general rule, you want the pile on the ground to be smaller than what's left of the plant.

• How you then approach the remaining growth can be different according to what plant you're dealing with (leave untouched? nip back by a third? take back to just a few buds?), and is when a spot of research can be a good idea.

What not to prune at this time of year:

• Anything which flowers in spring (e.g., lilac, ribes, forsythia). Pruning these now will remove much of the imminent blossom. Leave untouched until the show is over!

• Evergreens. Unlike deciduous plants, these still have some life coursing through their branches in winter (not much, but some), and can respond to pruning with new growth which is vulnerable to frost damage. Better to wait until late spring when conditions are starting to warm up.

• Plants with borderline hardiness or that are known to be susceptible to frost damage when cut, such as salvia, deciduous ceanothus, hydrangea, and many popular Mediterranean shrubby plants such as lavender and rosemary.

• Stone fruit, such as plums, cherries, and apricots. These are prone to disease if cut in winter, and are best tackled in spring or summer instead.

Wall-trained apples and pears, prior to their short-back-and-sides

Taken back to neat, productive fruiting spurs. Ideally, this would have been done in August, however we never quite managed to get around to it... better now than never!

One of the many shrub roses, mid-prune. Sad to wield the secateurs on something still hanging on to its flowers in mid-winter, but if not now, when?

Deed done

Jack undertaking the thorny task of restoring order to the pergola's climbing rose

Madame Alfred Carrière being whipped into shape

Having provided welcome winter colour with its bright orange hips, it's time for Rosa rugosa's annual trim and thin

Nearly done

One of our many hazels, post thinning-out

If we were to share one thought on pruning, it would be to take the textbooks with a pinch of salt. Yes, it's good to know what the official advice is, but this is rarely the only way. Pruning can also be influenced by practical considerations, such as how much time you have, when it suits you to do the job, and what you want from a plant. The latter may differ depending on where it grows; a shrub might be encouraged to fill a large space quickly in one part of the garden, while kept neat and compact elsewhere.

The key is to pay attention to how your plants grow and to try different approaches until you get the result you're after. This trial-and-error approach may cost you a few flowers or fruits along the way, but it’s worth remembering that plants generally want to grow. Most will put up with a fair amount of tinkering without keeling over. And above all, don't prune for the sake of pruning. Always ask yourself why you’re making a cut, and if you can't come up with a good reason, it's usually best to leave well alone.

As for us – next stop, the Orchard. Over the next couple of weeks we’ll be camped out there with secateurs, saws, loppers and ladders, working our way through the apple and pear trees. Rather wonderfully, this has coincided with the local bird population deciding to warm up their vocal cords, as this early-morning video shows.

This morning also brought a first for the garden: our very first kingfisher sighting (sadly not caught on camera). We were thrilled to watch it skim low over the pond before perching in one of the apple trees — perhaps regretting the visit once it realised there were no fish to be had. Even so, we were delighted that it chose to come and scope the place out!