Holly

Spent a good chunk of today taking the heart out of the largest Holly in the garden, which just continues to expand like some mythical monster: all you can do is take sharp implements to it every four or five years to check its ambitions. In the foreground, you can see some of the material I took out of the middle of the beast: there's two wheelie bins full of small stuff to boot.

Because this particular tree/shrub/monster is pretty mature and has been pruned radically many times before, it's actually not that difficult to deal with: you attack it from the inside, tunnelling your way in from the bottom and gradually working your way up to the top to take out the growth that, in this case, eclipses the view - glorious view - and which needs to be checked periodically.

The thing will inevitably look a bit weird for a while, but Holly is notoriously hardy and will grow back from being stumped to ground level: our other one, behind the potting shed, did just that; grew back from the most severe haircut imaginable several years back, and now forms the platform from which the male Blackbirds sing some twenty feet up in the air...