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Q: I have just been reading your book "Rejuvenating a Garden". What I need now is an extra footnote which advises me on the delicate skill of rejuvenating a garden and making it my own when the previous owner, who has generously entrusted me with its care, is breathing down my neck! Ideas, please. - Mrs G. Guest, Stafford

A: This happens so often. Point out that every garden, however good, needs a major rethink after ten years because plants compete for space, light, food and moisture. Don’t forget that asking someone else to bring up your child in your own house is not a recipe for sweetness and harmony. Unfortunately, I can think of a few great gardens where the owner handed over the garden to institutional management and didn’t get out. Each time it was disastrous. Sparks flew. When you leave a garden you have to let go; behind every good garden there is only ever one person in charge.

Q: A friend of mine has a little pink lilac bush in her garden, with small leaves. I would like to buy one, but she does not know its name. Can you help? — Mrs K. Swales, Bristol

A: The chances are that this is syringa meyeri ‘Palibin’. Previously known as s. palibiniana or velutina, it slowly makes a rounded chest- high bush. What a beauty it is, covered in perfumed blossom and much pinker than the common lilac. Nip out the tips of the longest shoots through June and July to keep it dense.

51 glorious garden websites

Times Online's gardening guru opens her address book to share her top pick of gardening websites

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Q: We have just returned from a holiday in southern France and are keen to replicate the trained plane trees typical of the area. They are pruned to form inverted umbrellas 3m-5m (9ft-16ft) tall, to give shade. Would plane trees work in our climate, or should we use something else? How would we train and maintain such a shape, and stop them looking so stumpy at the ends, as pollard trees often do? — Mrs J. Holmes, Wells

A: Good for you — have a go. Buy a well-branched standard plane tree as tall as your required canopy and give it a year or two to establish. Then cut back the leader to your desired height (and continue to remove any replacement leaders the tree may make). Train the remaining branches — the “arms” of your umbrella — horizontally sideways. If there are not enough, train over some of those replacement leaders. As a framework, you will need a ring of tall poles and, on top of them, a star of cross- members on which to train the living “spokes” (see below). Shorten back by a third the ends of the living spokes every year, so they make plenty of side shoots to furnish a dense canopy. Gradually you will create a disc of radiating stems (eventually self-supporting), to which you must cut back all the new sideshoots every year, as you would any pollard lime or plane.

In the long term, yes, the spokes will develop “fists” where the bursts of shoots appear each year. If this offends (I thought it was part of the charm) then you can cut back the limbs and redevelop new ones at the loss of your shade. Plane is ideal for the job, with interesting bark, shade- bearing leaves, and none of the problems of dripping honeydew from insects which you would get with limes.

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