Winter Pruning: Canopy Lifting and Canopy Thinning in Action

Winter pruning season is in full swing and I’ve been very busy for the last few weeks with a variety of winter pruning jobs. At National Trust Quarry Bank I’ve been working on the mature and veteran trees in the walled garden and Apprentice House orchards, and at the allotment I’ve been helping out on the orchard plot that I helped to plant in 2018 and have been assisting with, on and off, since then.

2025 was a truly epic year for fruit production and so in the 2026 winter pruning season I’ve been taking the opportunity to do some fairly major restructuring work on some of the trees in my care. My reasoning being that, after a heavy fruiting year, fruit trees have a tendency to drop into a biennial bearing pattern. A bumper year will often be followed by a resting year, in which far fewer fruits are produced¹The orchardist can attempt to interrupt this pattern by rigorously thinning fruitlets during the bumper year.. This partially occurs because this year’s blooming fruit buds will have been initiated in the previous year – I discussed the process in more detail in this 2021 article – and so if the tree used the bulk of its resources to ripen an excessive amount of fruit in a previouis bumper year, it will have had less energy available to initiate this year’s fruit buds, and therefore fewer fruit buds will be mature enough to bloom in the current, resting year.

Fewer fruits growing and maturing means the tree is likely to have more available resources – always depending on weather conditions, nutrient availability etc. – for vegetative re-growth of new stems and branches. Therefore, if there’s any restructuring or renewal pruning that needs to be done on mature tree, doing the work in the winter before a likely resting year seems like a good idea to me. By re-assessing a canopy’s shape and structure and then clearing plenty of space for new growth, we can try to avoid excessive overcrowding and tangling as those new stems grow and older branch sections continue to extend and develop. It makes a certain amount of sense, no?

Well, time will tell if my assumptions are heading in the right direction. In the meantime, here are brief overviews of three such pruning jobs that I’ve carried out in the past couple of weeks.

1. Canopy-Lifting a Mature ‘Nottingham’ Medlar

Eight years ago, fellow allotmenteer Mike and I planted up a derelict plot with an orchard of twenty trees, one of which was a ‘Nottingham’ medlar. Sadly, the nursery from which we purchased it sent it to us in what turned out to be rather poor condition: hacked back to fit in the delivery carton, rather than with good formative pruning in mind, and with all sorts of weirdly-placed side branches as a result. This pic is from 2019, the year after it was planted, and as you can see, it was all over the place:

As a result it grew very weirdly for the first few years, and I’ve spent every winter since then pruning it to try to encourage a decent central leader structure. By last year it had grown to a pretty decent size, and there was evidence that the aimed-for central leader was finally making progress. But a lot of the growth was still very low down on the tree, with long branches sweeping down to the ground; preventing access under the canopy for weeding and gathering fallen fruit, and encroaching on the neighbouring plot.

Mike and I therefore decided to go for a full canopy-lift this year, by pruning out all the main structural branches whose side-growth was causing the obstructions, and anything downwards-growing on the remaining scaffold branches:

You can see from the extent of the three large branches that we’ve kept just how much width the tree canopy had. The following view from the side shows that there’s still plenty of potential fruiting wood throughout the tree, so hopefully we’ll get some medlars again this year. And that stump of a lower branch that’s still protruding is just waiting on my coming back down the plot with my Silky Fox Gomtaro saw, which will go through that like a hot knife through butter.

With a bit of luck, this year the tree’s regrowth will strengthen that developing top section of the canopy and send out enough side-shoots in useful places on those three remaining major branches that we’ll be able to reduce their length, if not next year then perhaps the year after.

2. Canopy-Lifting a Mature ‘Nine Square’ Apple

The linear orchard in the walled garden at Quarry Bank, aside from a couple of veteran survivors of an earlier era, was planted in 2011 or 2012. The mature trees have now achieved heights and canopy widths averaging around 4-5 metres each way, although some of them are even larger, suggesting they’re most likely growing on MM106 rootstocks, or even M25²This is guesswork on my part, as I’ve not been able to find any purchase records for the trees on the server at work..

Unfortunately, when the trees were planted they weren’t spaced quite far enough apart to take into account their eventual full extent, and so over the years they’ve become quite crowded, with branches invading each others’ air-space and the stronger trees forcing the weaker ones to grow in odd patterns, stretching out to compete for access to light.

Last year’s extreme fruit load meant that some of the trees’ fruit-bearing branches dipped significantly under the weight of their apple-burden, to the point where they began to block access to the planting beds next to the trees. A good example of this is the ‘Nine Square’, a cooking apple that, if not thinned ruthlessly, produces clusters of quite large, dense-fleshed apples that hang on the tree until well into November, if not December.

Here was the state of the tree when I assessed it for pruning earlier this week:

I’d already removed one branch before I remembered to take a ‘before’ photo, but you can still see just how much low growth there was in the canopy. That’s all very good potential fruiting wood, and if the tree was in a field orchard with plenty of space around, I would have pruned it minimally and kept the majority of those horizontal branch sections intact. But you can see how much obstruction those branches were causing to anyone trying to work in the vicinity of the tree, and potentially to garden visitors walking past on the path. Good pruning is a series of decisions intended to either resolve a current problem with a tree’s shape and structure, or to prevent likely problems from developing in the future. So those problem branches had to go:

The ‘after’ photo was actually taken mid-way through the job, I went on to do a bit more work on the higher reaches of the canopy to reduce crowding in the centre and remove a few over-extended branches that were tangling with the next tree along – a ‘Blenheim Orange’; another variety not known for its modest and restrained growth – but you get the gist and can see the purpose of the canopy-lifting process.

Here are a couple more before-and-after shots³From slightly different angles and poorly focused in the second case, but there you go. that show how I took off entire branch sections right back to their point of origin on the trunk or main scaffold branches, just above the ‘collar’ at the base of the branch. That way healing should be rapid and successful, and the re-growth arising from the area around pruning cuts should be limited to four five new water shoots at most, in locations that make them easily controllable in next year’s round of pruning:

3. Canopy Thinning a Veteran ‘Conference’ Pear

Many of the trees in Quarry Bank’s Apprentice House orchard are now reaching veteran status, having been planted back in the mid 1980s. Half of the orchard is dominated by three massive oak-trees growing on the perimeter. They shade out the trees beneath for much of the day, and as a result those trees tend towards long branches and lots of poorly developed, under-ripe fruit, and the orchard’s ‘Conference’ pear is one of the worst affected victims of the far more massive, light-blocking oaks.

This year I wanted to try to resolve and improve the tree’s greatly overcrowded canopy. I took the opportunity of a tutorial session with one of our regular garden volunteers to spend some time focusing on reducing the abundance of bud-bearing growth in the middle of the tree and trying to re-balance the structure towards something that might have half a chance of producing a decent pear, one of these years.

I didn’t take any photos of the whole tree – the background detail was too busy, so the tree’s shape and structure wasn’t clear enough to be worth showing- but I did manage to find a decent angle that highlights the general sense of over-crowding, and how much that had been alleviated after we’d selected the busiest branch sections to remove:

The goal here was, once again and as always in general, to identify entire branch sections that were causing the worst clashes with their neighbouring limbs and then remove the entire branch back to its point of origin. Again, re-growth will hopefully therefore be limited to a few water shoots at the point of removal, whereas if we’d tried to reduce the overall size of the canopy by shortening every branch, what I’ve started to call the “hydra effect” would kick in, resulting in multiple points of re-growth from just below almost every cut point, and a thickening of the canopy in the following year, rather than the thinning that we were aiming to achieve.⁴I have plenty of photos illustrating exactly what I mean, so I’ll write up another blog post on the “hydra effect” at some point and explain the principle in detail.

Here are a couple of closer-in pics of that same section of the canopy, which I think nicely illustrate the thinning principle in action. It’s difficult to make out exactly which angle each branch is growing at, but trust me when I say that every one of them is now growing into a clear space, rather growing towards or into a neighbouring branch, and if next year’s fruit weight bends it downwards, it has space below it to dip into, without landing on another section of the tree.

This ‘Conference’ pear didn’t produce much fruit last year, so I’m hoping that with the number of fruiting buds greatly reduced, if the remainder were successfully initiated last year then we might have a chance at a crop this Autumn. We’ll see.

How about you? Have you had any large- or small-scale pruning jobs to do that you’ve found particularly interesting and/or challenging? Might you have approached any of the trees above differently? Is there anything about my process or decision-making that you’d like me to clarify or explain in more detail? Please do let me know in the usual manner, via the comments.

Footnotes

• 1
  The orchardist can attempt to interrupt this pattern by rigorously thinning fruitlets during the bumper year. ↩︎
• 2
  This is guesswork on my part, as I’ve not been able to find any purchase records for the trees on the server at work. ↩︎
• 3
  From slightly different angles and poorly focused in the second case, but there you go. ↩︎
• 4
  I have plenty of photos illustrating exactly what I mean, so I’ll write up another blog post on the “hydra effect” at some point and explain the principle in detail. ↩︎