Preface: On Rock and Roll, Pruning and Love I once read an article about the musician Lou Reed, who was looking back on his Velvet Underground days. I remember reading that he still gets a buzz every time he turns on his amplifier and feels the hum of electricity flow through his guitar. This made quite an impression on me--since the beginning of his musical career, Lou has probably turned on his amp most days, and it was inspiring to read that each time he does, he feels the same excitement, the same potential of what the day might bring, as he did when he was a teenager. Granted, pruning is not quite rock and roll, but I get a similar feeling to that guitar amp buzz that Lou described every time I reach for my pruning tools at the beginning of the day. The anticipation of the damp morning dew soaking my shirt sleeves, the sweet smell of fresh box, or boxwood, clippings, the sun--or rain--on my back and the satisfying first clip of the day through to the inevitable aches and blisters that will arrive later that evening. I love the physical action of pruning, in all its manifestations. I love climbing up ladders and chopping things down. I love the quick jobs that only take five minutes but achieve so much, and the satisfied feeling at the end of a demanding job well done.

Most of all I love the results: the effect that a few deliberate cuts, or years and years of gradual teasing can have, not just on a plant, but the whole garden. I love the way pruning can create landscapes, evoke far off places and memories and how it can surprise and even shock, focusing and distracting viewers by turns. I love its solidity and permanence, but also its fragility and the grey area it occupies between man and nature, gardener and garden. What qualifies as creative topiary or decorative pruning? Anything really, when approached from the right direction and with the right mindset, but I get particularly excited by interesting forms, ambitious scale, unusual plant types (not so much exotic as unexpected) surprising contexts, breathtaking locations, visible enthusiasm on the part of the owner or creator and a generally vibrant atmosphere. Gardens in Provence, France, tend to score heavily when it comes to location--Gourdon, hanging onto a cliff face suspended over a rocky valley, is one such spectacular example, while the Keage water treatment plant in Kyoto, Japan, although clearly not the most glamorous place in the world, does have the most amazing repetition of azalea blobs planted on its banks, the sheer weight of numbers there achieving a look that more sophisticated gardens could not. Where do I draw the line? There is no room in this book for animal topiary--no teddy bears or squirrels allowed, although since writing this, I have noticed that one or two examples seem to have somehow crept in. If that upsets you, write your own book. On the other hand, although pruning itself is not weighed down with creative potential, I rank agricultural hedge flailing--the cutting of farmland hedgerows by tractors armed with lethal flailing chains as practised in the UK--as a highly sculptural process that is fully worthy of inclusion in this book.

Some people disapprove of this method for environmental reasons, but the sight of a well-flailed hedge running across the countryside is as inspirational to me as any garden I have seen. If you still feel any doubt about the possibilities and potential of agricultural pruning, as opposed to horticultural pruning, look no further than the tea plantations in the Far East, where bizarre landscapes of tea cover entire valleys like limestone pavements. During the creation of this book, I have become much more aware of how interconnected the various genres of pruning I was thinking about actually are. When I began writing, I started off with a very clearly defined list of chapters and sub-sections. It soon became clear, however, that it was not chapters that were called for, but some sort of family tree, or a map of a river system with endless tributaries, flood plains, backwaters and oxbow lakes--or even some vast web of interconnected strands. A Venn diagram of pruning turns into one large circle that encompasses everything and excludes nothing, so please forgive any apparently erratic subdivisions and understand the dilemmas I faced in writing this book. Eventually I settled on chapters covering topiary and shaping, cloud pruning and organic topiary, hedges, niwaki and Japanese-influenced pruning, decorative tree pruning and a slightly indulgent look at creative pruning.