[New shoot]

£3 is pretty good.  Nice work Nige    

I've been reshaping my standard bays today and giving them a tidy up.  Pruning bay trees is such a lovely fragrant job 

[JayG]

Thought I'd show you just how much a bay tree will put up with - this is a recent picture of my 15 year old tree which over the years resisted all my attempts to keep it reasonably small and tidy.

It's only a few feet from my kitchen window so much as I didn't want to kill it, around late August last year I decided this was time to deploy a saw rather than the trusty secateurs! 

Despite the surgery being rather late in the year it's sprouting new shoots from what was left of the old ones, and many more from even the oldest parts of the trunk, which makes it almost as good at regeneration as privet in my book! 

(The shoots at the bottom aren't new plants, they arise from near the base of the trunk and I left them there as a source of leaves while the rest of it regrew, or in case it didn't!)

Think it will be quite a long job trying to get it into a nice tidy (and smaller  ) shape, but at least it's still alive!

[New shoot]

That is a prune and a half    Even more drastic than mine when we got the new fence put in, but it shows how tough bay is.  That should give Snow White the courage to lop her overgrown tree down

[snow white]

Definately.  Can't wait to try now.