Half the gardens I work in around Ledbury and Newent have an old apple or a perry pear in them, and most of those trees have not been touched in years. Winter is when that gets put right. The tree is asleep, the leaves are gone so you can actually see what you're cutting, and the shape you leave now is the shape it grows into come spring.
Why winter, and which trees
Apples and pears are pruned in the dormant season — roughly November to early March. Pick a dry day when it isn't freezing. Cutting into frozen wood tears rather than slices, and the wound sits open longer.
The bare frame is the real reason to do it now. In July you're guessing at the structure through a screen of leaves. In January the whole thing is laid out in front of you: what's crossing, what's dead, where the light can't get in.
The trees you must not cut now
This is the one that catches people out, and it matters more than anything else on this page.
Plums, damsons, cherries and gages are not winter-pruning jobs. Cut them in the dormant months and you invite silver leaf disease and bacterial canker, both of which come in through open winter wounds and can take the tree. Stone fruit gets pruned in summer, when the tree is growing and seals up fast.
Apples and pears are fine. Anything with a stone in the middle of the fruit waits.
What to actually cut
Work in this order and most of the decisions make themselves:
Dead, damaged and diseased wood first. Take it back to clean healthy growth. Often this alone is half the job on a neglected tree.
Branches crossing or rubbing. Two limbs grinding against each other wear a wound open all year. Take the weaker one out.
Growth heading into the middle. The aim is an open centre — a goblet, more or less — so air moves through and light reaches the fruit. Congested middles are where scab and mildew settle in.
Suckers from the base and vertical water shoots. Straight, whippy, vertical growth carries very little fruit. Take it off at the point it starts.
Cut back to just above an outward-facing bud, and don't leave long stubs — they die back.
One thing worth knowing before you shorten every branch tip: some apples fruit on the ends of last year's growth rather than on short spurs along the branch. Trim every tip on a tip-bearer and you have neatly removed next year's crop. If you don't know which you have, leave a good number of tips alone and watch where the fruit sets.
How much is too much
Roughly a fifth of the canopy in one winter is plenty. A quarter at the outside.
Take much more and the tree answers in spring with a thicket of vertical water shoots, which is the opposite of what you wanted and takes years to undo. Fruit trees respond to hard cutting by growing wood, not fruit.
An old tree that has been left for a decade wants renovating across two or three winters, not rescuing in one afternoon. Take the dead wood and the worst crossings this year, live with it looking half-finished, and come back next winter.
Bottom line
Dry, frost-free, between November and early March. Dead and damaged first, then crossings, then open the middle. A fifth of the canopy, no more. And if it has a stone in the fruit, put the secateurs down until summer.
The other winter job worth doing while the leaves are off is the country hedges — same reasoning, and the timing is covered in when to cut a hedge.
If there's an old tree in your garden that nobody has pruned in years, give me a call. The orchard country around Newent and Ledbury is full of them, and most are worth keeping rather than losing.