January is the month when every gardener needs sharp secateurs.
Obviously we always need sharp secateurs, blunt ones being as useless as a mower with no petrol, but there’s a lot of extra cutting back to do in mid-summer.
Deadheading roses is ongoing. Roses look awful covered in dying blooms and are worth deadheading for that reason alone.
Deadheading also directs their energy into flowers rather than seeds, so means a longer season of bloom for a beauty such as the shrubby climber R. chinensis Mutabilis.
You can prune tall, once-flowering roses like the double yellow Banksia (R. banksiae) and single white Cherokee (R. laevigata) now if you want to restrict their size but this is optional. Country gardeners are really better off giving them a large arch or better yet a shed and leaving them to get on with it.
At least you’re reaching onwards and upwards when deadheading a climbing rose, unlike crawling around on hands and knees to tackle a spurge (Euphorbia). January is an ideal time to deadhead these attractive but sticky perennials. Don’t forget gloves and goggles to protect yourself from their nasty rash-inducing sap.
Many euphorbias, including prostrate E. myrsinites with glaucous blue leaves and taller E. wulfenii with huge drumheads of green flowers are ferocious self-seeders, carpeting a garden within a couple of years if you neglect to remove spent blooms.
Italian lavender (L. stoechas) also self-seeds and needs pruning now along with its more restrained French cousin (L. dentata). Don’t cut too hard though, lavender never breaks from bare wood. Tip cuttings will make small plants by late autumn and rocket away next spring.
This is also the time to take winter flowering daphne (D. odora) cuttings. No garden should be without this small, neat, shrub: it is frost and drought tolerant, has glossy leaves clothing it to the ground and dainty pink and white flowers.
Best of all, its sweet, penetrating scent catches your breath in the depths of winter while the rest of the garden sleeps under a blanket of frost.
Some flowering perennials reproduce easily from stem cuttings taken in summer. Last February I took cuttings of Purple Tails (Teucrium hircanicum) a knee high, mid border plant with furry, greyish green leaves and slender spikes of purple flowers appearing for many weeks from December onwards.
I took 15 centimetre-length cuttings from between the stem nodes, stripped the leaves leaving the top pair, stuck them into a box of compost and put them into my propagating cupboard.
This set of shelves with a zip up plastic cover, placed against a shady, south-east facing wall, lets me leave cuttings for days at a time without worrying that they’ll dry out.
The Purple Tails shot away and I had a dozen new plants by April.
Warm, humid January weather will often bring an outbreak of leaf-chewing earwigs to your garden.
A piece of rolled up newspaper left out overnight should catch them, and you can shake them into a bucket of soapy water in the morning.
