Olive and Let Die
The other week on Gardener’s World, Monty handed out a piece of mischievous advice from the late Christopher Lloyd. Most gardeners agonise over the ‘right time’ to prune a plant and Lloyd, famous for his garden at Great Dixter, cut through all this. He said the right time to prune a plant was when he was standing by it with the correct, sharp pruning implement. That’s my kind of gardener.
On Sunday it just so happened that I was standing next to a line of seven olive trees with the extendable loppers. I have no idea if October is the right time to prune olive trees, but I was standing by them. The previous owner of our house (or his landscape team) had planted them. From various clues we have deduced he was not very fond of gardening – the Astroturf for one thing - and it looks like he maybe had one single go at pruning them.
Most probably in the dark. With a 14" saw.
Each tree was now a complete tangle. Though in his defence it does seem that olives are particularly wanton; at every possible opportunity they spur off at 90 degrees. That’s 90 degrees up and down, or left and right. You might say that they have an Etcha-sketch way of responding to the cut stem.
My mission was to reduce them in height so we could see more of the back garden, and yes see more of that luxuriant expanse of Astroturf. My wife had suggested I give them a “small trim” to improve the view and allow more light to the azaleas underneath which were dying away. Now my wife’s idea of a “small trim” is akin to a Brazilian logger’s approach to the Amazon rainforest, very little is left afterwards.
Her favourite shrub to have a go at is Robinia. The last time she gave the Robinia a “small trim” I came back down the garden to find that a swarm of locusts had attacked it leaving three leaves, a few stems and a stump. Her justification for this horticultural assault and battery was, “I cut it back more last time and it didn’t die.”
That kind of approach is faultless. We were meant for each other.
I started snipping away with the loppers, trying to keep in mind all the wonderful olive trees we’d passed in Greece over the years. They weren’t straggly, with multiple crossing branches, and stems suddenly making right angle turns both up and down. By the time I’d finished, it was looking less like something Gerald Durrell would find butterflies in on the island of Corfu and more like our old Robinia.
I photographed the evidence for my own prosecution.
When my wife saw them she was very pleased. “Perfect,” she said.
