A young fruit tree is a promise of things to come, but the shape it carries into maturity is decided largely in its first four or five years. Get that shaping right and you will be rewarded with well-coloured fruit, easy picking and far less disease. Get it wrong and you will spend the next twenty years cutting out congested wood. The good news is that training to an open centre is straightforward once you understand the principle behind it.

Why the open centre matters

An open centre — sometimes called a vase or goblet shape — is exactly what it sounds like: a ring of main branches around a hollow middle. It suits apples, pears, plums and cherries grown as free-standing bushes in a British garden, and it works because of three simple things.

• Light reaches the fruit and the leaf buds that feed it. Apples that ripen in dappled shade are smaller, duller and often poor keepers.
• Air moves freely through the canopy. Still, damp pockets are where scab, canker and brown rot take hold after a wet British summer.
• Access is far easier. You can reach in to thin fruit, pick a crop or cut out a damaged branch without fighting your way through a thicket.

A crowded tree also shades its own lower branches, which quietly stop cropping and gradually die back. Keeping the middle clear is the single best investment you can make.

The framework you are aiming for

Think of a young tree as scaffolding. You want four to six main branches — the leaders — spiralling up the trunk rather than springing out opposite one another. Spacing them roughly 45–60cm apart in height gives each one room to develop its own fruiting spurs.

Aim for a clear trunk of about 45–60cm before the first branches begin, then a centre you could pass a clenched fist through at the top. Try to keep the leaders at around 45–60 degrees from vertical. Branches that shoot up almost vertically grow wood rather than fruit, while ones that droop too low lose vigour and become shaded. If a young branch is too upright, a small spreader — a short stick with a notch cut in each end — will coax it outwards without any cutting at all.

Shaping a young tree in its first winters

Start with a maiden or a two-year-old tree and work patiently. In the first dormant season, choose three or four well-placed shoots to keep and remove the rest cleanly. The following winter, shorten each leader by about a third, cutting to an outward-facing bud.

Make that cut properly. Slant it gently away from the bud, leaving a short piece of stem above it — a couple of millimetres is plenty. Too close and the bud dries out; too long and you leave a stub that dies back and invites canker. Always cut to a bud pointing away from the centre of the tree, so the new growth continues outwards rather than into the middle.

Removing congested wood

By the third or fourth year, congestion is the enemy. Walk round the tree and look for branches that rub against each other, cross over, or head straight into the centre. Deal with them before they thicken and the wounds become large.

• Rubbing branches: remove the weaker of the two, or the one growing inwards.
• Crossing wood: take out the branch that spoils the shape, not the one that fills a gap.
• Competing leaders: if a branch is more than half the thickness of the one it joins, it will take over. Cut it back hard or remove it.
• Water shoots: strong, upright shoots on the inner framework rarely crop well. Rub them out while young if you can.

Cut back to the branch collar — the slight swelling where branch meets trunk — but never flush with it, and never leave a stub. And be restrained: take out no more than about a quarter of the canopy in any one winter. A tree stripped hard will simply answer with a forest of vigorous new shoots, and you will be back where you started.

Timing, tools and the wildlife in your orchard

Apples and pears are best pruned while dormant, from November to early March, avoiding frosty spells when the wood is brittle. Plums, cherries and damsons are different: prune them in summer, between June and August, so the wounds heal quickly and the risk of silver leaf infection is much reduced. A touch of summer pruning in late July also helps keep trained trees in bounds and encourages fruiting spurs — shorten young laterals back to three to five leaves.

Use sharp bypass secateurs and a pruning saw for anything thicker than your thumb, and clean the blades between trees. Then think about the wildlife sharing your garden. The law protects nesting birds under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, so check the branches before you cut between March and August; a blackbird or blue tit will happily nest in a fork you were about to remove. An airy canopy suits lacewings and ladybirds, which patrol for aphids, and it lets pollinators find the blossom in spring — never spray while a tree is in flower.

Leave a little windfall fruit on the grass in autumn and you will feed red admirals and commas, blackbirds and thrushes. Stack any cut branches in a quiet corner as a log pile, and you turn a morning's pruning into habitat. Shape the tree well now, and both you and the garden's wildlife will benefit for decades.