While so many of us are shut up indoors in the face of the cold weather and covid restrictions, it’s surely the ideal time to reflect on your gardening. Whether you have a garden, allotment, balcony, window box or space indoors, there are always new things to grow as well as some tweaking and nurturing to be done. And you may even have the opportunity to find a new life for old plants.

Take my garden, for instance. It’s now 14 years since I took on a scrubby wilderness and a good deal has changed in that time. What I inherited was a 27x17m (90x55ft.) rectangular plot full of overgrown shrubs from boundary to boundary. It’s no exaggeration to say that it was like walking into one of the more forgotten corners of Narnia. That might sound delightful, but it wasn’t. Believe me.

Taking on an existing garden

Years of neglect meant that there was a thicket of dead branches and stems extending to about 5m (15ft.) high, all topped off with a thinning fringe of foliage. Any flowers were held high above where there was no chance of enjoying them. Some plants had died out altogether, having given up the fight. And though it might be assumed that it was a haven for wildlife, conditions deep in the underscrub were far from perfect for teeming life. The best thing about the garden was the soil which had lain undisturbed for years and which had been enriched by a shower of leaves from the shrubs above.

The temptation could have been to rip it all out and start again. In fact that’s what so many new homeowners do, whether the garden is overgrown or not. But I’ve always been a great proponent of waiting for a full season to see what comes up in a plot. Not everything will be to your taste, but there can equally be a great inheritance to be had from the previous owners.

How to prune overgrown shrubs

So in the first autumn, and on through till the following spring, I dug out the dead and hard pruned the living. When I say ‘hard pruned’, I mean down to within 30cm (12in.) of the soil. And that’s the great thing about most woody shrubs and some trees, you can take advantage of the fact that many of them have dormant bud ‘initials’ under the surface of the old bark. This has come about as a safeguard against the plants being browsed off in their natural environment by animals. In the garden, you can emulate this with your secateurs to rejuvenate overgrown specimens. Deciduous shrubs (those that lose their leaves in winter) are best tackled at the end of winter – late February into March – while evergreens should be left until April, even May in colder parts of the country.

In the first year after my assault, the change was miraculous. Previously moribund shrubs responded with up to 2m (6ft.) of new, vigorous shoots from the base. By the summer, I was able to pinch back and thin out the growth, starting to reform their shape. Winter-flowering viburnum and shrubby honeysuckle, weigela, philadelphus, spiraea and fatsia were all recovered in this way. And in the autumn, I lifted and re-positioned them to provide ‘instant’ shape and stature in the outline of the garden’s new layout.

Lift and move mature bushes

Moving such mature specimens is quite a job in itself, I know, but it is well worth it. Digging a trench around the circumference of the rootball to one or two spade’s depths is the best way to start, before undercutting the roots and sawing through any belligerent ones. A particularly huge and tenacious Viburnum x bodnantense ‘Dawn’ took me hours to excavate. Set in it’s new position, however, it seemed to barely blink and today it is a great backdrop in one of the borders.

And now, all these years on, I’m plotting to move some of the shrubs that I planted as smaller specimens. Thanks to my regular formative pruning, they’ve not reached the proportions of the overgrown ones I inherited when I moved here. But over the next few weeks, I’ll be out there, patiently digging and lifting to re-use plants to re-fashion my garden. Now that’s got to be good for the body, mind and soul during lockdown.