Despite the glorious summer, it has been a hard year in the garden. Fox cubs, now young adults, have made the garden their playground, careering through the beds and crapping knowingly on the table and chairs, the lettuces, the cold frame and even inside one of my shoes. They came into the kitchen to do so and took the other shoe and chewed it to pieces in a clearing they had made by flattening the cleome. They wilfully smashed all the hemerocallis when they were just coming to bud and have snapped off the rodgersia to clear what have now become dusty tracks. I have been on the verge of tears and, I might add, bloodiness more than once and thanked my lucky stars that in all these years we have been spared until now.
I have been cutting back hard when things have been smashed, to refenerate plants uhat I think can take it. Where the foxes have changed their habits and moved on elsewhere, the sanguisorba are back and gleaming with fresh new foliage, as are the geraniums and the astrantia, which are throwing up a few new flowers. Fresh foliage at this time of year is a bonus as the garden has also struggled with the dry weather and is looking shabby in places. It is the usual August slump, but there are always ways around it.
Foxes aside, a good crop of foliage keeps things looking fresh and lively when the garden is over the first flush and not yet relaxed into autumn. The Clerodendrum bungei are a good example and over the years this suckering shrub has jumped through the beds to appear spontaneously and in combinations I never would have planned. You have to watch this unruly behaviour if it decides it likes you, and I'll pull the suckers where they are misplaced. Those that aren't are pruned back hard in March, like buddleia, and then hard again in early July to keep the foliage coming. Left to their own devices, the Clerodendrum bungei would be in flower by now but the second cutback delays the sugary domes of flower until the autumn. The leaves, which are heart-shaped and made larger by pruning, are about the size of an outstretched palm. They are fetid, foxy even, if you brush them, and the colour of copper beech.
Pruning hard to encourage dramatic leafage is not a new thing; the Victorians were masters and used it in their extravagant bedding schemes. "Architectural" plants such as the Castor oil plant and canna were often the focus of these schemes, but they used shrubs and trees, too. Ailanthus altissima, the tree of heaven, will produce leaves that are almost a metre long if the plants are "stooled" to the base at the end of the winter. You will barely recognise them when you see this effect for the first time and by the end of the year the plants will form a many-stemmed mound six- to 10ft high if your soil is hearty.
Pruning hard is only advisable after plants have been in for a couple of years and are strong enough to bounce back because they have their roots established. You should remember that with such severe treatment, they require a good mulch and a feed to reward you. In a friend's garden up the road, we have punched up the scale of things by "stooling" a small group of the foxglove tree, Paulownia tomentosa. The scale of the leaf is further heightened by the fact that this is a small London garden. Soft and velvety with fur, each leaf expands to the size of a child's umbrella.
I do this here in the garden with the Vitis coignetiae, whose leaves I use for serving plates at summer parties, as well as the Melianthus major, which never looks finer than in this run-up to the autumn. Each leaf is grey-green, with a jagged edge to the margin, as if it has been cut with pinking shears. They cover for a multitude of sins elsewhere; for this year the sins have been many.
