How to Prune Fruiting Plants

This is a practical gardener's guide to pruning and training tree fruit and soft fruit, with easy-to-follow advice and over 300 step-by-step photographs. It is a complete guide to pruning and training fruit trees, with instructions for creating standards, cordons, espaliers, fans, pyramids, bushes and curtains. It is lavishly illustrated with over 200 inspirational and practical photographs, as well as nearly 100 specially commissioned artworks showing pruning details. It includes popular fruits such as apples, pears, plums and raspberries, as well as more unusual species such as quinces, figs, gooseberries and cranberries. All the gardening techniques are shown in close-up step-by-step photography and diagrams, making the tasks absolutely clear and easy to follow. A useful directory of varieties provides essential information about the best types of fruit to grow. This illustrated guide to pruning fruit trees and soft fruit aims to take the mystery out of pruning, showing how the correct training of trees and shrubs improves both their fruiting capacity and their shape, resulting in more produce and a tidier garden. Fruit trees can be trained into a variety of shapes, from poles to fans, and they can be grown as free-standing trees or trained against walls or fences, or even planted in pots. The book also covers cane fruits such as raspberries and blackberries, and bush fruits such as currants and gooseberries. Beautifully illustrated with over 300 photographs, this is a wonderful introduction to the art of pruning fruiting plants.