Classic Gardening

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It's time to prune the olive trees in Italy. Adriano, my brother-in-law, has a couple of dozen around his house in the village of Malcesine on the shore of Lake Garda in northern Italy, and he kindly offered to initiate me.

He knows I have fruit trees back in London, so he let me loose with his super-sharp machete, and allowed me to clamber up the precarious ladders - one metal pole with steel struts poked through it - that the old boys scamper up and down like monkeys.

Olive pruning is not as easy as it looks, but the principle is straightforward enough. What you have to do is tackle the apial dominance - the propensity of the olive to reach for the sky and use all it's energy in growth rather than in producing olives.

So some hefty main boughs have to be taken out to give the top of the tree a crestfallen appearance like a dog that's just been shown it's place. Then you have to tackle the myriad branches that are growing skyward along every horizontal branch.

After that it's a question of thinning vigorously to ensure the forest of downward-growing branchlets have room to breathe.

Finally, you have to drink a very large quantity of local red wine - nothing fancy, the stuff in cardboard cartons from the local supermarket goes down a treat. That bit's easy.

I can't say I performed like a superstar, but I enjoyed my first lesson. Perhaps Adriano can help with my mulberry harvest come August. I'm not sure he quite believes that you can make wine from anything other than grapes.

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