Hello steragram, your damson along with all the prunus family need pruning now, may to early july to be precise, if done in the winter then silver leaf can be a problem, and regarding the privet, then now will be just fine, dont forget you can go in quite deep to renovate privet and it will always respond, yes it will look unsightly for a while but by the end of the summer it will have greened up again, once the shoots appear let them grow out abit and then give them a slight trim to encourage thickening, done now you will probably get two trims in this year, be wary of privet thrip have noticed alot of this lately, spray with bugclear just to be safe, having said that i have hard pruned privet in the winter and it responds well but now will be ok, julien.

Thank you Julien - I will get on with it then. I have never heard of privet thrips - always something new to worry about!