Xref: 127.0.0.1 uk.rec.gardening:161780


"Barry Watts" wrote in message
...
I've heard and read many different stories of how to reduce the size of a
mature Cortaderia Seloana - everything from removing the crispy bits while
wearing gloves, to setting fire to the whole thing! The later would be
risky, as this particular specimen is close to a wooden fence. It looks
great about now, but the rest of the year it's really rather scruffy, with
loads of dead foliage in the centre which is almost impossible to get at.
It could clearly do with a trim. I'm thinking of cutting it right back to
about 1 foot of its base - as it says in one particular article I found.

Does anyone have any experience of hard pruning these wonderful plants?

I got some tree surgeons to have a go at ours with a chainsaw. They chopped
it right down to about a foot of (apparently) dead wood off the ground. It
looked absolutely awful. This was in March.

Now it's massive, almost as big as it was a year ago, and covered in plumes.

So I say you can hard prune them quite extensively!

Mark