I left it a bit late to start lopping the tops of the tree, as it wasn’t dormant when I did it last week.
I read that a Lime Tree needs pruning or cutting back in the time when it’s ‘sleeping’. Apparently this is in between the time the leaves fall, and before it starts re-budding.
The problem with that, is that that it’s such a short period in the south of France. The last leaves fell in January and now in March it’s full of new shoots and buds already.

I’ve had to cut everything back really savagely as I need to visualise all the dimensions of what’s going to be built.
Admittedly, each plant hadn’t been tendered to for at least 10 years – there was a 5m high Elderberry, two very large Lilacs of different colours (which were sprouting leaves already), and two very large climbing Dog Roses.
The lilacs I will dig up and replant in the new garden, along with one of the climbing roses.

Two pictures of the garden from both ends from January 2016 before I owned the house

In total I’ve got about 260m2 to play around with here.