Pruning is an important routine maintenance operation in orchards managed for fruit, and one of the most laborious. In some low-input contexts it doesn't have to be done every year, and chemicals known as 'growth retardants' minimize the need for pruning in intensively managed orchards.

If you are new to pruning an unhelpful myth is that each cut is either right or wrong, and that you have to learn the right way. Often the victim consults a diagram of a hypothetical tree covered in a blizzard of red bars indicating correct cuts. This merely undermines what little confidence the aspirant pruner had to begin with. There is of course a difference between good and bad pruning, but two experts will make different cuts to arrive at an equally happy outcome. In addition, the way a tree reacts to a particular cut will depend on the tree and where in the crown the cut is made. Thus, there are no easy generalities,

 The first thing to do is to look closely at your tree or trees (in winter). You have to observe the following:

 1. Kind of buds. There are two kinds, those that develop into leafy shoots and those that give blossom (then fruit if all goes well). The former are typically slender and held close to the stem, the latter are typically plumper and more conspicuous, often held on small pegs or spurs.

Is the tree well furnished with fruit buds? Where in the crown are they concentrated (assuming the tree is more than a few years old)? 

 2. Age of wood. Each year of recent growth is separated by an encircling scar on the bark, which is visible close-to. One-year wood, which grew the previous growing season, is the outermost (most distal) growth and is typically straight, slender and tending to the vertical. It bears mostly (if not exclusively) leafy buds.

 3. Pruning history. A tree may have been unpruned for many years, in which case the one-year wood will be just a few centimeters long and the crown will be crowded with old, suppressed and dead wood. If the tree has been formerly pruned but inexpertly by decapitating branches, the tree may well have reacted with a profuse growth of more recent wood from the cut ends.

 4. Size of tree. You have to make a judgement: Should the tree be bigger than it is now, the same size or smaller? This is largely determined by vigour. Excessively high vigour (reflected especially in length and abundance of one-year wood) is associated with low fruitfulness, while low vigour is associated with a predominance of old wood, little extension growth and fruit of poor quality. You are aiming for something in-between: a steady turn-over of fruiting wood that is not allowed to get too old. If vigour is high, consider allowing the tree to develop a bigger crown volume. If vigour is low, the tree should be thinned or (if senescent) reduced.

 5. Shape of tree. Do you want to walk under the tree, have it spread to a particular extent, get to the base with a lawnmower or pick fruit without having to climb? In young trees, don’t worry too much about the height of origin of the main branches, at least in the absence of large animals like sheep or deer – you can have a low origin with branches that ascend obliquely to any desired height.

 You have now described the tree to yourself in a way that will enable you to prune it since any particular cut can now be judged to be more or less good relative to this description.

 When you start pruning, try to bear in mind the following simple principles, even if they make you dither over individual cuts. Speed comes with confidence and experience.

 1. Don’t remove too much one-year wood in the mistaken belief that pruning has to involve a reduction in size. This is a very common error. Instead, aim to remove a proportion of older wood, requiring relatively decisive cuts.

 2. Favour for removal branches with lots of old pruning wounds or that are otherwise contorted, suppressed or crowded.

 3. Try not to decapitate branches, even small ones, and do not leave branch stubs. Instead, the sap should flow as freely as possible to the extremities of the crown.

 4. Aim to increase the lighting/ventilation to retained branches, not just the fruit buds. The foliage of any one shoot helps to nourish the fruit buds on that shoot. 

 5. To the extent possible, favour branches tending to the horizontal. The more vertical the shoot, the more vigorous (less fruitful) it is likely to be and the quicker it will increase further in vigour at the expense of the rest of the crown, spoiling your desired tree shape.

 6. Constantly bear in mind this desired shape. Is a certain branch helping to define it or not?

 7. If necessary, force branches towards the horizontal by tying down, weighting, half-breaking or tucking under other branches. These various ways of directing growth without pruning, called training, lend themselves to relatively small and flexible branches (but aren't restricted to recently planted trees).

 8. Bear in mind that a good crop (as well as the foliage) heavily weights the tree, sometimes dragging smaller branches into a pendulous or even ‘weeping’ position, where they become fixed by the radial growth of new wood in late summer. The outer crown can subside over 1m in the course of one season.

9. A suprisingly small number of fruit buds are required to give a good crop, so there is likely to be an excess. Don't shy away from cutting some out. 

 10. If you don’t feel you have your eye in, prune once round the tree then stand back. You’ve probably been too timid. Go round again until the appearance of the tree is pleasing.

 11. Bear in mind that you can only do so much, say to remedy neglect, in any one year. The more you do the more the tree will respond with an abundance of new growth, creating work the following year. On the other hand, some new growth in desired places in the crown is likely to be needed, which might involve cutting back, and other decisive cuts might be needed to assert the tree form you have in mind.

 12. Aim to prune every year if you can, and have patience. It can take some years to remedy neglect.

13. The growth of the tree is a dynamic process that you are seeking to influence by pruning. Try to develop an appreciation of how the tree will react to a particular cut or way of pruning, partly by observing how it reacted in the past.

14. It is said that no-one ever killed a tree by pruning it. That's something of an overstatement, but along those lines the saying: 'if in doubt, cut it out' can be helpful. Should you make a certain cut? The way to find out is to make it then see if you regret it. More often than not you won't.

 If the foregoing is all too complicated, just remove about 20% of the crown. Don’t just cut off outer shoots but some older and bigger ones too. Concentrate on cutting out whole shoots rather than decapitating them or leaving stubs so that, after five years, much of the crown (with the exception of the bigger framework branches) will have been renewed.