Anne Wareham gives F&F readers just one piece of garden design advice. Warning: following this advice may make your garden incredibly stylish.

Very few people start a garden with an empty plot. And conventional advice is to wait a year to ‘see what comes up.’ Apart from being unbelievably boring and frustrating doing that, it is making quite the wrong assumption. You are more likely to despair than rejoice as you view your predecessors’ choices.

In fact, one of the most important, – and even exciting – things in garden design is removing things. It’s instant gardening and transforms immediately in a way that planting never can. But people are a little inclined to relate to  garden plants as if they were little furry animals and the idea of getting rid of them horrifies.

Well, whether it’s a new garden to you, or the one you have been gardening for the last ten years, go and have a look with destruction and great courage in mind. What can you get rid of? That old lilac bush that flowers meanly once a year miles overhead so you can neither smell nor cut the flowers? That ash tree which is taking all the light and giving you weeding nightmares? That unnamed plant your aunt gave you and which you have never liked? (never give people plants they haven’t actually asked for – it’s quite criminal and you deserve to discover it languishing on the compost heap). That geranium which just is not the right colour.

Take your loppers out there and cut back all the lower branches of a tree, flush to the trunk. An exposed tree trunk is so often a delightful sight, and cleaning the trunk will bring light in underneath, increasing the range of plants you can grow. Err – but do check the view behind before you expose it.

Lop away at a messy shrub, watching all the time where the branches go and the pattern that they make – make it your job to show off that pattern by energetic pruning. Not too energetic though: hard to stick severed branches back on. But suddenly you should see pattern emerging and adding a whole new element to a rather dull bush. You’re familiar with the principle – a variation of a Brazilian wax? Consider whether you have any shrubs that might benefit from shaping as topiary, or from cloud pruning?

Check out whether there’s a part of your garden which you tend to avoid. There’ll be something wrong there that you haven’t been willing to address. Brave it and see if what you need is to remove something. It may be something you’re fed up with, or that isn’t quite dead yet, or something which didn’t quite want to be planted there. Grasp the nettle – or whatever it is – and get rid of it. You’ll feel better and have an instant new garden.

And the final benefit is that you will see the garden afresh – which is the hardest trick in the book and the most critical if you are to make a garden worthy of your efforts.

Anne Wareham runs the website ThinkingGardens and also owns Veddw, which she designed herself.