Wicked weather over most of the country has left many of our evergreen shrubs battered and tattered. When and how should they be tidied up? Not yet, and carefully, is the short answer.

Some shrubs have split branches which, surprisingly perhaps, can be bound up with insulating tape or similar and may ‘heal’ themselves. Others with frost tinged shoot tips – many of the cistuses, hebes and ceanothuses and foliage plants such as pittosporum and bay – must be left for a while; there is more nasty weather to come, we are told. It may well be that once these dead tips are removed in April, early shrubs will have their flower power much reduced for this year. However they can be pruned properly in June to encourage new shoots that will flower in 2011. Hebes (that flower later) may fare better, but for those that are badly maimed this may be the year to renovate them completely, pruning them hard back (not before May) and sacrificing this year’s flowers.

One thing we can tackle with vim and vigour this month is rose pruning – all those traditional bush roses and lanky Modern Shrubs (e.g. English Roses) can be reduced by two thirds, the dead, oldest and skinniest wood removed completely. My tip? Start by crouching right down and look at the bushes from below to identify the shoots that should come out, and observe how the basic structure looks. You are aiming to produce a balanced ‘candelabra’ shape with dormant buds (in the leaf scars) facing outwards and as few crossing branches and ‘dog-legs’ as possible – hard to achieve if you just fiddle around pruning roses from the top downwards.

Gardeners get seriously itchy fingers by October, and want/need to start chucking out old annuals, cutting back really exhausted herbaceous plants and to carry out all sorts of adjustments – but with 40% less rain than normal last month (where I live, at any rate), the soil is still rock hard and we should all try to hold off disturbing plant roots until the soil moist. The great garden clear up is therefore going to be a protracted affair.

Given the right soil conditions, however, the next few weeks are a good time to lift and divide herbaceous perennials that need it (after three or four years).  Their best bits – the outside sections – should be replanted in compost-improved soil, and will re-establish themselves quickly before the temperature takes a nose dive next month. It is now common practice not to cut back or disturb those plants that have ‘good winter structure’, or that provide birds with food – or just something to trapeze around on for fun.  As long as this year’s debris is cleared away and everything is shipshape by March, all will be well.

This is not a serious shrub-pruning time, however much we may want to ‘tidy’ them up.  Leave spring flowering shrubs such as Ceanothus and Hydrangeas well alone or you may find yourself cutting off the best flowering shoots.  Late flowerers such as Buddleias and Hypericums can be cut back by half if they are a real eyesore, and pruned properly  (down to a low, woody framework) at the correct time, in early spring.