Shrub pruning in Dorking

Careful, plant-by-plant pruning for shrubs and roses in Dorking’s older, established gardens.

Shrub pruning in Dorking often means inheriting someone else’s planting. Lots of houses in town go back to the interwar years or earlier, and many of the borders we see are full of big, settled shrubs that have been there longer than the current owners. They don’t need hacking back. They need the right cut at the right moment.

That’s careful hand work a hedge trimmer can’t do: thinning, shaping, deadheading, cutting back perennials and grasses, and taking every pruning away. If a shrub has got out of hand, we’ll renovate it over a season or two rather than cut it to a stump and hope.

When to prune what in a Dorking garden

Timing beats technique. Shrubs that flower on last year’s growth, such as forsythia, philadelphus and weigela, want pruning straight after they flower. Cut them in winter and you’ve cut off next year’s show. Late-summer flowerers like buddleia get cut hard in early spring, and roses are pruned in late winter. Soil shifts the calendar a little here. Gardens on the sandy greensand warm up sooner in spring than gardens on the clay, so early cuts can sometimes go in a week or two earlier. The sandy heath on the Nower is a clue that greensand leans acid, which is why camellias and rhododendrons often do well on it.

Shrub pruning services, not tree work

We’re gardeners, so we stop where shrubs stop. A laurel or holly that has quietly become a small tree over twenty years is a borderline case, and we’ll be straight about which side of the line it’s on. Anything that needs climbing, rigging or a chainsaw at height belongs to an arborist. In the Dorking Conservation Area, about 47 hectares of the old town, work to trees also needs six weeks’ notice to the council, so it’s never a spur-of-the-moment job.

Pruning in Dorking: your questions

Anything else, just ring. You’ll speak to the people who do the work.

Can you rescue a shrub that’s taken over the border?

Usually. Most deciduous shrubs take a staged renovation well: we remove about a third of the oldest stems each year for three years. Some, like lavender and many conifers, won’t regrow from old wood, and we’ll say so before we start.

Do you prune roses?

Yes, in late winter, with deadheading on regular visits through summer. Bush roses get a firmer prune, shrub and climbing roses a lighter one with some tying in.

I’m in Westcott. Are you one of the pruning services near me?

Yes. Westcott, Brockham and Pixham are all well inside the 15 miles or so we cover. Shrub pruning fits neatly into a regular maintenance visit, or we can do it as a one-off.