After an emergency garden rescue in the heat of summer several years ago. I re-homed this five-foot shrub in my garden on the edge of a stone wall, where it looked magnificent, but lost the will to live as anything approaching five-feet. Had I cut it back hard I may have saved more of the height of it, but I was weak and could not bear to. Surprisingly I was not too bothered when it failed to re-leaf the next year, as its round and contorted silhouette was so exquisite that it functioned as a piece of installation art.

The twisted branches and vase like shape of the contorted filbert make it a perfect specimen for dramatic impact in late fall and winter. In earliest spring, when delicate two-inch yellow catkins hang suspended from light grey tendrils, the effect is more than dramatic – it is magnificent.

There were no catkins hanging from those dead branches for me, but I did not mind. A year later it resprouted from a point above the graft union and began a very slow process of regeneration.

And today I am face to face with the fact that it is well over-time to cut back the brittle but beautiful remains of the original shrub and let the new stems have a chance to make something equally beautiful someday. But they’re going to insist on growing leaves to do it. And there’s the rub.

Much like other filberts, the leaves are coarse when they come, and seem incongruous in a shrub that elevates floral nudity to an art form. The effect is much like throwing a heavy rumpled blanket over Michelangelo’s David during the height of touring season.

It is a shrub best suited to the naked life.

There are other taxa that share the state of Clothing-as-Catastrophe. Sycamore is a white winter monarch, but swiftly disappears into the summer woodlands and spends all summer throwing perfectly good leaves over perfectly clean beds. Citrus poncirus, the hardy orange, is a thorny, contorted beauty in deep green which is lessened by non-descript leaves in spring (though redeemed by tiny oranges in fall). And who cares to notice yellow or red-twigged dogwood on summer walks through the garden? Even if you were determined, you’d be hard pressed to pick them out against a sea of green.

We delight in each of these winter blockbusters as the fall reveals form and color, and sigh deeply when May brings the mediocracy of foliage, but the alternative would be foolish. January must have a few ups for all of the punishing downs.

Over the last few years I have relished the silhouette of my mostly-dead contorted filbert. I threw uplights under it for winter evenings. The cats used it as a wildly complicated climbing tree. I wound a couple of homeless clematis on it - one for spring and one for summer. Winter aconite bloomed at its feet in February, forget-me-nots in May. It was the perfect bit of organic garden sculpture and never lost my affection. At one point I considered painting it in a bright glossy blue, but thankfully reconsidered. There was no need to gild this particular lily.

And now, much to my chagrin, it is clothing itself. I have used the old branches to provide support for the new ones – guiding them into equally complex poses that will delight the eyes in winters to come. In doing so, many of the old branches (now covered in lichen and florescent forms of jelly fungi), snap off in my hands and remind me that my days with this beautiful sculpture were numbered.

Yes. It is all for the best I know, but still there is regret.