Shrubs that flower on the coming year's growth, like the gaunt giant Buddleja, can be pruned now and in the coming weeks. The wood is flimsy and easy enough to cut, so most of the work can be done with loppers and secateurs, with the banana saw coming in handy for a few seconds on stouter shoots.
Slice and saw away, setting the unwieldy but lightweight shoots aside one by one, until the whole thing has been reduced to a roughly even structure of 1in-thick branches, like a rather coarse pincushion. Snip off any spindly shoots, and make a bonfire.
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17 outstanding homes for sale across Britain, from under £250k to £6.5 million, as seen in Country LifeSomething for every budget in this week's round up of homes across the country that have come to market via Country Life.
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'We started thinking: if we were going to design a bike for Aston Martin, what would it look like? And then we simply couldn’t stop': Aston's new bike has everything you could ever dream of — except a price tagThe new Aston Martin .1R bicycle, a collaboration with manufacturer J.Laverack, leaves Paul Henderson stirred rather than shaken.
