Reader Queries:

Q: In the snowy period after Christmas, the rabbits ate 18in of bark off my young apple and pear trees, for most of the way round. Will the trees survive? Should I prune them as normal, or would the shock be too much? Also, I have an eight-year-old black mulberry tree which gave me one fruit this summer, much to my delight. Does it need any pruning or feeding to help with next year’s bumper crop? - Mrs J. Harrison, Shotesham, Norfolk

A: No plant can survive if the bark has been stripped off right around. If it’s off for most of the way round it can stagger on, but it will never make a vigorous fruit tree and disease can enter easily. But take heart: a mulberry needs no pruning except in middle age, to relieve the weight a little. And as long as it seems healthy, don’t feed it.

Q: We live in an Edwardian terraced house in Edinburgh and would like to grow some plants against our garden railings (which are 1m tall by 6m long) to provide shelter and privacy. We don’t want bushy shrubs which would take over the narrow beds alongside. Any ideas? The garden is north facing and the soil is acid clay. - Mrs S. M. Mackay, Edinburgh

A: Two or three different kinds of plants are quite sufficient on a run of 6m. They’ll need to be tough, and able to be peeled off the railings now and then for maintenance.

You could plant a swag of cotoneaster horizontalis – it’s easy to grow, generous with its flowers and berries and makes a lovely fan of arching, fish-tail branches. Try Scotch Flame Flower (tropaeolum speciosum) among the cotoneaster to give you red flowers right through the second half of the year and blue berries to follow; it’s quite at home in cool, acid soil.

Or you could opt for bright-yellow honeysuckle (lonicera tragophylla), which has huge flowers and loves shade, but unfortunately has no scent.

For some winter cheer, try the evergreen euonymus fortunei, ‘Emerald ‘n’ Gold’, to bank up against, or even weave among, the railings.

Q: I have a young fig tree which produced a lot of fruit at the end of last summer. Most of the fruit remained unripe and is still on the tree. Do I take these fruits off, or leave them on? - Mrs J. Gray, Thaxted, Essex

A: It's the tiny, hard, embryo fruits made in the late season that will successfully develop the following year. Embryo fruits made mid-summer will swell and try to ripen but fail as winter comes on. These failures you describe can be taken off, leaving only those tiny ones to ripen this summer.

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Q: Thirty four years ago I planted a Virginia creeper on our house. Two years ago we cut it down to the ground to facilitate painting of the house. It then grew back to the gutters, as expected. We are getting older now and not happy up ladders. If I cut it down and use a chemical killer, would the roots shrink under the brick-paved drive and cause big problems? - Mrs J.Hallam, London

A: Old Virginia creepers do make ladder work, and the nests they bear encourage flies around the windows. A specimen of that age is not going to have roots so large that there will be disturbance under the paving as they rot.

Decaying roots turn slowly to soil without leaving a significant cavity, and in any case you will not be putting intense pressure on one spot. You go ahead and kill it; you have had your money's worth. Apply Root Out to the stump as soon as it has been cut off and there is sap left to draw it down.

Q: The bottom of my garden is shady, so the grass will not grow and the moss has taken over. If I cover the area with pebbles instead of grass will I get a mossy- pebble area or will it turn into a green and unsightly slimy patch? The garden is dry, but with the help of an irrigation system I grow hellebores and hydrangeas around the edge. - D.G., Lewisham.

A: If moss grows in the grass, then it will grow among pebbles, and there is no reason for it to be slimy rather than mossy. To make weeding easy, lay a water-permeable textile over the soil first (you can buy this from your garden centre), then pack the pebbles tightly on top. Fill between them up to their waists with sand to draw up the moisture a little. Better still, use sand mixed with some of the moss. Put the moss briefly through a blender to shred it, then mix it with the sand – a handful of moss to each two to three bucketfuls of sand. It will take a few months to get going, and if it’s really dry, the moss may colonise the sand more than the pebble tops for a year or two. Still very attractive.

Q: I have oleanders in white, pink and peach, but cannot find them in any reference book. I need to know how to prune them. They all flowered wonderfully last year, but I’m left with spiky tops where the flowers were. - Mrs C. Jones, London

A: Just to make life tricky, the Latin name for oleander is nerium oleander. Pruning is easy enough. Just shorten back the flowered shoots to firm plump wood, usually by about half, and do the same to the side shoots.

This is normally done after flowering in autumn, but it’s not too late to do it now; flowering may just be delayed a little. Remember that the sap is poisonous. If you stand oleanders in a warm spot outside in summer (as hot as you like), they will happily flower there, but later than they would under glass.

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