Autumn surprises

"There is a harmony
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,
Which through the summer is not heard or seen,
As if it could not be, as if it had not been!" Percy Bysshe Shelley

In the northern part of Europe, we are able to enjoy the power and the wonder of the changing seasons in an exceptional way. In southern England, as I drive through the country, I pass through beeches with leaves blazing, hawthorn berries give the green of the hedges a rusty hue. Walking through the village I see wisteria in yellow and sumac in bright dark red.

In our little garden everything is changed. I no longer concentrate on individual flowers or weeds, I take in the collages of colour as leaves turn to yellow, orange, red and purple, and forget the obsessions of the summer.

Sometimes a neglected corner brings surprises. I didn't think that when in the spring I planted witch hazel in a big pot, I would be now looking at a picture that included yellow leaves, a lily stalk and the remaining green haulm of a sweet pea. 

 Or at the effect made by the brightly marked leaves of pulmonaria against the fallen leaves of the Viburnum plicatum. 

The breeze-block wall is now mainly covered by a regenerated Virginia creeper, at it's best at the moment.

Each day I tell myself that this will be the moment to tidy up and prepare for winter ….. and each day I put it off till the next, so that I can enjoy the ever-changing patterns. The first frost to penetrate our little sheltered space will tell me when to get down to tidying.

Competition

A Flower does not think of competing with the flower next to it, it just blooms. Anon

Gardening involves competition. I don't mean entering prize marrows for the flower and produce show, I mean the competition that we participate in every day that we work in the garden. We compete against the weather and the weather always wins. We also compete with the plants that compete with each other, and this is a competition I intend to come first in.

 

We returned to England after 6 weeks in France, where hollyhocks, cardoons and mulleins rule.

 

Meanwhile, the cottage garden in Dorset has been looked after by Rachael who has watered the citrus and Streptocarpus plants in the house, and the pots in the garden; she has dead-headed roses and lilies.



So at first glance, everything looks fine. The trouble is that some things have flourished at the expense of others.
 

I don't really like to call plants 'thugs', because that implies that they have a say in how they behave. But there is no doubting that when plants have the conditions that suit them, they will out-grow the neighbours that are of a more delicate nature. I have been very grateful for these successful plants while the garden was in development, because they fill spaces that are waiting while I experiment and get to know the 'terroir' and gradually populate the garden with the plants that we enjoy the most.

Wild strawberries and nasturtiums are the most troubling at the moment. The strawberries, with their clear green trifoliate leaves, scramble over the little stone walls in a most attractive way and, as a bonus, have charming white flowers and lots of fruit. However, they have put out so many stolons that the more compact plants such as pinks, and osteospermum have been swamped in the process. A prostrate phlox hardly has a chance of survival. I must win the competition for the weaker plants by putting a lot of wild strawberry in the compost bin.

The nasturtiums, of course, grow from seed, the seed that was scattered by last year's plants. There were lots of nasturtiums last year and so there are lots this year – lots and lots and lots.


Something has been attacking the leaves (black fly/snails?), so the plants are leggy, with few flowers, and many stumps which no longer terminate in leaves. Any space left in the compost bin has surplus nasturtium plants in it.
 

There are other plants on my hit list, but they may find new homes. Alchemilla mollis and yellow archangel will go to Burgundy, and Japanese anemone to Brussels. I like it when plants can find a new home, but compost is useful too.

Opening our garden in Dorset

Courage is a love affair with the unknown. Osho

When we have visited open gardens I have asked myself 'why do people visit other people's gardens?' Now I am asking the same questions as we open our own garden. I suspect there are as many reasons as there are visitors, but the love of gardens in some form is at the root. It may be to glean ideas for people's own gardens; haven't we all done this? It may be to talk about gardening with someone other that one's spouse. Perhaps to bounce ideas off someone else who knows the practicalities. It may be just for a pleasant day out in the fresh air finished of with a cream tea. My biggest reasons would be to see how a a garden fits in with its physical situation, especially the built environment, and how the character of the garden meshes with the personality of the owner.

We 'screwed out courage to the sticking point' to take part in the Open Garden weekend in mid-June. Our village has some rather spectacular gardens and some rather large gardens. Ours is neither, but we felt we might appeal to people who have a more modest patch.

Below is a log of what happened, first by way of a tour of the garden and then in some of the comments from visitors. On the gate we posted a little run-down of the progress of the garden during the last 3 years and a sheet of pictures taken during its development.

What a pretty little garden

From the pictures you can really see how far you've come

Wow, gorgeous, so lovely

I love the way you've got more garden by going upwards

The stones look very heavy to move

I wish my garden was as small as this

A good tip for keeping tulips is to plant them in pots within pots that can be taken out after flowering, dried over the summer and then returned to the big pots in the autumn.

I can try that at home

We've only got a small garden and it's nice to see what you can do

I love the look of astrantia in the garden, but I hate the smell of it as a cut flower

The acer looks so tall up there

I love the way the plants crawl over each other on the wall

My hosta/alquiligea/chrysanthimums ... died during the winter.

How do the nematodes work?

You've made this into a very special place

I shall certainly look at the blog!

The occasional person came in, glanced around and went straight out again.

A third garden

'There are rich counsels in the trees.'

Herbert P Horne

The third garden is not ours. It is not in Dorset, nor Burgundy – it is in Brussels. It belongs to Matthew, Alice and Freddie, who love it very much but don't really have much time to give to caring for it.

This garden, quite unlike the other two, is on the edge of the city, where the houses give way to the beech woods that extend for miles to the south east of Brussels. The climate is continental and the soil very heavy. The structure of the garden is simple, with a lawn surrounded by established shrubs, roses and some box hedging.

The front of the house has a flourishing wisteria, which adds to its cottagey feel. This is very much a garden for early summer.

The classic recipe for an easy-to-maintain garden is a planting of shrubs and bulbs. But shrubs get quickly out of hand if not pruned, and wisteria, in particular, is famous for sending unwanted shoots into nearby gutters. Roses become straggly and misshapen if left to their own devices. As the akebia put on growth in the spring, it did its best to strangle the rhododendron and wegeila, resulting in some heavy detective work to liberate the bushes and a large pile of foliage to be put out as green waste.

The back of the house has some rather lurid orange walls enclosing the outdoor seating area and there are holes containing flowering plants. How the plants hang onto life I don't know, but in early summer they are looking pretty.

It's beyond my remit to improve the soil or replant, but it is possible to add colour by bringing extra plants as they arise from the gardens in England and France. The first additions were bulb lasagnes in terracotta pots planted in the autumn to start off the year

and snowdrops, primroses and violets, which will brighten the darker days of next spring.

I have experimented by putting Toscana strawberries into hanging baskets to hang on the house walls. Planting hanging baskets isn't something I have done before, but I am hoping for pretty flowers and delicious fruits flowing over the edge in a cascade – we'll see.

I'll leave the lawn mowing to the owners.

Dorset - Autumn to spring

'All was silent as before -

All silent as the dripping rain'

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The reordering is happening sooner that I thought. The seasons are so unpredictable and seem to take their toll. The winter was consistently wet and there was little frost; I find to my sadness that some of the plants that should have woken in spring have disappeared. It's those that I moved in the autumn – sanguisorba, allium, scabious, semi-aquilegia – that seem to have suffered. Some of the earth that should be showing signs of life is bare and needs to be enlivened. I embark on a frenzy of sowing, including seeds that Abi brought back for me from Mexico. I can't read the Spanish instructions, and anyway I don't think they would be applicable in my circumstances, so I scatter them and keep my fingers crossed.

There are places where there is a charming patchwork of spring bulbs and greenery and the tall walls are starting to be clothed by the climbing shrubs. On warm days we can sit in the sunshine and enjoy the surroundings.

 

Over the winter some miracles have been happening. The builders who have been with us for three years have now finished their work and we can claim back the visual and physical space taken up by their privy and building stone. I can get to the gardening equipment in the shed which up to now has been covered up by piles of dusty paint pots and bags of sand and, best of all, they have finished making the greenhouse.

    

The greenhouse is my pride and joy. It is very pretty – an oversized terrarium, really – and in a flash I have filled it. The sad citrus bushes that have been outside under fleece all winter, the rather dead-looking Christmas cactus plants, the auriculas that have been almost drowned and lots of trays of seeds. After a recent spending spree at the local garden centre there are a few tender plants as well waiting for the magic moment when the danger of frost is passed.

Dorset, looking back to Autumn

'It is only the farmer who faithfully plants seeds in the spring who reaps a harvest in the autumn.' B C Forbes

The cottage courtyard in Dorset was really pretty during last summer, but in autumn I took stock. Plants have been collected a little haphazardly and put into the ground a little haphazardly over the year. The result has been pleasant, but perhaps not as perfect as I would like.

There were gaps that I filled with snapdragons. These are plants I really like, but when bought as a tray of bedding plants, they turned out to be very technicolor and tended to visually swamp their neighbours. It was time for them to go, anyway. There is a line of Sweet Williams that I sowed last year for the same purpose, so gaps will again be filled.



Some plants have taken to their new surroundings with ease, crowding out others and growing too tall for their allotted space. Some have done the reverse.



Now comes the moment when the economical side of me jumps for joy and I can make the one plant that I picked up on a garden visit into 3 or 4. Veronica gentianoides, a beautiful pale blue spire emerging in early summer, is one of these. Pulmonaria has done very well and can be spread into the shadier and damper parts of the garden. The bugle Bordeaux, however, has run riot and outlived its welcome and, along with some of the Japanese anemones will find a new home in the Squibb garden by the church.

This re-ordering is going to be an annual activity, and I relish it. Standing back, imagining the plants showing their form and colour in their own season, and wondering how they could be placed to better show off their potential is a yearly pleasure. It also adds that element of surprise that is so enjoyable in gardening.

France - winter into spring

'Clearly it's time for a rethink to realise the potential of this diverse group [perennials] of plants.' Michael King

During the winter the big Norwegian maple that dominates the courtyard has been reduced by half, leaving just the big trunk and some shortened arms above. This tree is glorious in its own right, but it is simply too big for the space. It provides shade in the heat of the summer, but we also need some of the garden to have light, so that attractive plants can be allowed to flourish. I also asked the 'paysagiste' to invigorate two hazel bushes by removing a third of the older branches and to dig out a cotoneaster to provide space for future planting. What actually happened was that the guys who did the work cut the tops off the hazels parallel to the ground, and did pretty much the same to a philadelphus, some tall rose bushes and the cotoneaster. I think it is partly that my wishes got lost in translation and partly that that the French gardeners know what is good for me – pruning à la française! There is no damage here that 5 years of growth won't sort out.

We had hoped to replant the large area in the middle of the garden this spring. Lucia from Parterres en Kit has created a planting plan consisting of grasses and perennials suitable for the Burgundian conditions and based on the principles of prairie planting as used by Piet Oudolf, Michael King and Noel Kingsbury. However, the work on the roof, which requires this patch of land to be left so the roofers can walk to and fro, has been postponed to June, so all I can do for the moment is to sprinkle some seeds of meadow flowers and hope that we have something other than bare earth to take us through the summer.

The beds around the edges are now flourishing. There were snowdrops everywhere and narcissi blooming where I moved them last year. The hydrangeas are throwing out new leaf shoots and seem to have completely recovered from last year's summer drought. Vinca minor, flag irises, peonies, cistus, tulips all look healthy.

 

 











Violets, primroses, winter aconites and hellebores look lovely in their new positions in the side borders. I feel that the edges of the big picture are comfortably settled.

With the reduction of the trees, the landscape does look rather different. The patch underneath the group that comprises the Norwegian maple, two hazels and the philadelphus grabs my attention. I can make a little woodland garden that joins this area to the dinosaur garden behind it. Last spring I moved many of the snowdrops, that had colonised the small bed that will become the herb garden, to places under trees. Snowdrop bulbs are small and many have escaped me and flowered in the 'wrong' places this year. I move them 'in the green' to the shade of the deciduous trees, digging up the beautiful but pernicious wild celandine plants one by one as I go. 

        

 Some tiny tulip and crocus plants also escaped the fork last summer, so they go to the fringes of the shade that will be cast by these trees when their leaves burst later in the spring. 3 tiny sarcococca bushes with their delicious spring perfume will be happy here as well. There are violets to be harvested from other parts of the garden and lamium from the garden in Dorset. Necessity is the mother of invention.