A tour earlier this week around the Fruit displays at RHS Wisley in Surrey – the Fruit Demonstration Garden and Fruit Collections showing a variety of trained forms especially of Apples and Pears, but also a whole range of stone fruit and soft fruit. I moved on into the extensive Fruit Fields.
The Fruit Fields are large orchards with apples, pears, plums as well as grape vines, cherries there too, though it was mostly the apple and pears that were the thing this week – and the winter pruning regime that the RHS are in the midst of even now.
I’m in the middle of preparing a longer blog on winter pruning – following my visit to the Earth Trust last week – and having re-read many of the books I have on the subject. This will I hope put some flesh on the subject and give some context to the photographs in the following gallery. I’ll annotate them in the new piece and group them together.
In the meantime, you can simply walk in my footsteps – around the Fruit Demonstration Garden, through to the Fruit Collections and some of the larger trained specimens – fans and espaliers, double U’s and arches – and on into the Apple and Pear orchards. These were being pruned by the orchard team and students. The red and white tags on the trees show that they have been winter pruned, conversely those without have yet to be touched. I double backed to the trained specimens before heading home.
The Teddington Gardener 
Reblogged this on The Teddington Gardener and commented:
With a view to my workshop on fruit tree pruning next week at Petersham Nurseries, an opportunity to flesh out the subject with some photographs from RHS Wisley – their pruning regime won’t start until the New Year but will carry on right through to late March, almost up to bud-burst. Some work can be done now, though with the exceedingly mild weather, leaves are still hugging the trees and this in itself will make the job more trickier, obscuring the architecture of your trees. I’ll be looking at soft fruit too, those requiring some attention round abouts now, but I’ll post on this another time.