Get the secateurs out of the garden shed and start winter pruning

17:01:20 18th January 2010

January signals the time of year to dig the rusting secateurs out of the garden shed and start tackling the overgrown back yard.

The Telegraph gardening writer Helen Yemm advises that for "compulsive short-back-and-sides" gardeners, who may feel the weather outside is still too bleak to make any substantial changes outdoors, touching up hydrangeas or hardy fuchsia stems would be sufficient.

For others, a good place to start is with pruning tough subjects such as climbing roses.

"If it is not too finger-numbingly cold I start by pruning a couple of toughies. First, climbing roses - I cut back neatly all the shoots that flowered last summer to within a few leaf scars of the old, browner shoots that form the basic framework of the rose," she writes.

"I remove, too, a really old bit of each rose's framework in order to encourage the production of replacement growth next summer."

The Royal Horticultural Society advises that routine pruning of climbing roses should involve removing any dead, diseased or dying branches, tying in of any new shoots, and pruning of any flowered side shoots back by two thirds of their length.

If the plant is heavily congested, old branches should be cut out from the base to promote new growth, the organisation reports.