One of our current skills is keeping our collection of bright coloured conifers healthy and to size and in proportion. A crucial discovery that we had made about conifers was that for all their foliage to look healthy, without dieback, they need ‘all round’ light and therefore, in our replanting scheme, they would need to be allocated their own space. This would mean that maintenance of the garden would include checking each conifer every few months to ensure that other plants were not growing into the conifers and occluding light. Any pruning would need to be sympathetic and seamless so that neither the conifer or other plant looked obviously pruned. Furthermore, this care would lead to maintenance of clear definition of each plant. Our style of pruning an overgrown conifer, see: ‘Pruning conifers’

By 1990 we had realized that the type of conifers we needed in the garden were ones with attractive, bright foliage throughout the seasons, and which could be maintained to size and look tidy after pruning once a year. Although many of the conifers we decided to select had bright yellow or blue foliage, however this criteria was not exclusive since we were aware of several other varieties of conifer would play a role, e.g. Chamaecyparis obtusa Nana with its bottle green foliage and Chamaecyparis Lawsoniana Summer Snow with its white young leaves. We also decided to select several conifers from each of the Taxus, Abies and Thuja genera of coniferous trees.