I meant to continue with Monty Don’s British Gardens series this week but I haven’t spent the time watching a second time to clarify my thoughts so that must wait. Instead, I channelled my former garden writer persona to capture a before and after as I pruned a camellia.

I was flattered when a gardening friend and camellia aficionado complimented us on our camellia pruning last year. I think his comment was along the lines of how much he notices and admires it every time he comes into the garden. It is not that we prune all our camellias by any manner of means and we do clip, shape, restrict or clean up in many different styles, depending on the role each plant plays in the garden. One size does not fit all.

Camellia minutiflora is a dainty little species with the prettiest of tiny flowers and naturally arching growth which we like enough to have maybe half a dozen specimens through the garden. Normally, we try and prune in early to mid-spring but, as I cleaned up the border in which this one sits this week, I could not ignore that it needed some work done on it, albeit in the height of summer. In so doing, I cut a lot of flower buds off but it has so many that it doesn’t matter and the form is more important, really.

I started by taking off all the growths that were shooting straight up because we want to accentuate the arching growth. Second was pruning back the branches that were arching out too far; third was lifting and thinning from the bottom up. Finally, I thinned out what remained, tracing branches back to the trunk and checking how much bulk we would lose if I took off the whole branch. Always, I try to cut flush to the junction point and to make sure that the outermost cuts are, to all intents and purposes, invisible so no stumpy bits half way down the branches.

It used to take me ages to prune a plant like this but I am getting faster with practice and this was an hour from start to finish, using secateurs and a pruning saw. The pile in the wheelbarrow is well over half the plant in volume. Ralph supervised, as he does, but did not offer advice.

And voilà. The finished product. It is all about freezing this plant in size, finding its form and making it a shapely statement, rather than an unruly blob.

It is growing at an angle and we don’t mind that. It is perhaps a form of bonsai on steroids and in the garden rather than a pot. We want the plant to feature on its own, not to meld with its surroundings.