Leave a good looking corpse. Even when I'm not negelecting the garden I tend to not cut the hydrangeas back after they have flowered, because I think they look great in winter.
The plan for today is to get rid of the biggest of the self seeded sycamores - it has been there several years and the base of the trunk is about six inches thick. I have cut it back every year but never tried to dig it out before.
Later .... well it came out - but it took a couple of hours and I had to dig round it to a depth of nearly three feet.
