– Cut back those climbers wrapped around gutters and roofs – ivy, Virginia creeper, climbing hydrangea, Clematis montana and the rest. Take them back to a jagged, natural profile, not an engineer’s straight line. The tips of ivy shoots are notorious for breaking off and remaining stuck to the wall. Instead of peeling each shoot back from the tip (they break), cut through a larger stem a couple of feet lower down and tug vertically – the whole thing usually comes away intact.

– It’s a good time to erect training wires on walls for fruit trees or heavy climbers. Ideally use vine eyes, heavy-duty galvanised wire and tensioning bolts. Even if you only use nails and wire (and who doesn’t?), make sure the wire is an inch off the wall, to make getting string around it easy.

– Moss may be rampant in lawns now, but wait till the spring to deal with it.

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How do I prune an old bottlebrush bush? Ours is only 5ft high but 10ft wide and still spreading. It’s a problem when cutting the lawn, but we don’t really want to have to remove it. Mr A. Olding, Ringwood, Hants

The best way to handle these is to keep them in hand with regular thinning, because sometimes they sprout from old wood, sometimes not, and the fewer heavy branches you have to chop back, the better. But you are not going to get back from 10ft to 5ft or 6ft without some chopping. Why not live with this whopper and let it consume some lawn, or have it out after this year’s flowering? (That would also be the time to prune it.) I do think bottlebrushes (Callistemon) are one of those plants whose image is so much more appealing than the reality – the foliage is thin and the form is as spindly and lax as a moorland broom.

There is always so much bare, rather disreputable stem behind the young shoots, and it niggles like that patch of cheek your 80-year-old father always fails to shave, or the teenager with the half-up, half-down collar. Bottlebrushes are somehow never quite the business. In a small garden one can do better.

My husband moved to a new job at Christmas and his former colleagues gave him a beautiful maple as a leaving present. It turned out to be incredibly pot-bound. I know it is bad to plant a tree when its roots are spiralled round in the pot, but these are too rigid to spread out. What should we do? Mrs P. Grayson, Littlehampton

Plant a seriously pot-bound tree and it will be unstable in the long term. Prune its roots before you plant and it will be unstable in the short term. What to do? I’d go for root pruning – at least you can stake it for a few years until it makes some decent, spreading, supportive roots.

Tease out the compost from around the roots (hosing it off may help) and cut away the root that actually goes round and round at the very bottom of the pot. Shorten back the roots which plunged down the sides of the pot, to a decent fork. Keep as much fine root above that as possible. Now plant it, well staked. Use the mycorrhizal supplement Rootgrow when you plant, to increase the effectiveness of the diminished root system.

stephen.anderton@thetimes.co.uk

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