Industrial-scale orchards are hardly a realistic ambition for most gardeners, but with cordon fruit trees you can still get good yields of your favourite fruit from just a limited space. Cordon cherries comprise a columnar main trunk with short, lateral fruit-bearing spurs, resulting in a much narrower fruit tree than normal ‘Stella’ deservedly boasts the Royal Horticultural Society’s Award of Garden Merit and produces brilliant sweet cherries that are perfect for eating fresh ‘Sunburst’ becomes wreathed in glorious white blossoms in the springtime, with the flowers preceding the appearance of sizable dessert cherries in the heart of summer ‘Morello’ is a fantastic self-fertile variety, yielding brilliantly sour cherries that make for excellent syrups, jams and pies Our growers have painstakingly established the proper cordon shape for your cherry tree, so all that’s left for you to do is give your tree an annual prune. The main thrust of the pruning ought to be carried out in summer, with the odd winter prune being helpful as the tree gets older. Here are our top pruning tips: Towards the latter part of August, cut back shoots that are over 20 centimetres long, trimming them down to a single leaf beyond the cluster of leaves at the base of the current year’s growth (often called the basal cluster) If you find that your cordon’s spurs are becoming overly congested or crowded, which can happen from time to time with more mature trees – then thin out some of the less productive, older spurs (this is the winter part of the pruning process)
