Niwaki’s founders on pruning their way to happiness

It’s not uncommon for Jake Hobson to dream of trees. “I wake up in forests in the middle of the night,” says the 53-year-old founder of the Japanese horticultural-tools company Niwaki (a word that appropriately translates as “garden tree”). Yet when Hobson first moved into the red-brick and pyramid-roofed north Dorset home he shares with his wife, Keiko, and their son, Digby, in 2011, its long-neglected garden was dominated by concrete paths, five sheds and towering suburban…