Late Pruning

Acrobatic female Bullfinch

We are always late with pruning our ancient Buddleia. We do promise ourselves that we will do it before Christmas so that the buds can develop early. Last year, though we had an excuse to leave it later – in late winter/early spring we cut it back drastically and removed lots of dead wood and overlapping branches. So we complacently ignored our promise to prune in early winter and left it with all the new shoots and dead flower heads.

We have been rewarded with a pair of Bullfinches. They come most morning to sit on the ends of the branches and acrobatically and methodically pick out all the seeds from the dead flower heads.

What a reward!

Now we have no crisis of conscience from chasing them away from our soft fruit bushes but pleasure in seeing them fattening on Buddleia seeds. We were totally unaware that they formed part of their diet, but now that we do, I think we may leave pruning to late winter every year.