Carol Klein makes some new year gardening resolutions and answers your questions
Now’s the perfect time to take stock and plan for the year ahead
Though bad weather often pre-empts work in midwinter, by the same token it creates a chance to dream, sometimes even to plan. The main photographs in my articles and the pictures on the cover of Garden News, (the best gardening publication!) are by Jonathan Buckley. They're often the catalyst for many of my plans, which occasionally become reality.
One of the advantages of the ‘bleak midwinter’ is that you don’t get sidetracked by all the tasks that need undertaking in summer. You can think more objectively. This year has been a busy one and though at one time it looked like there might be more time to devote to the garden in 2020, that may not be the case. Our Channel 5 series Great British Gardens, Season By Season has been recommissioned, there’ll be Gardeners' World too, plus the flower shows.
We’d better get on with it then. Last year we had little help in the garden, but at the moment Graham spends a day or so here and Dean comes once a week. They're a great help and some plans have begun to take shape.
We’ve made a start in one long bed that runs alongside the hedge that separates us from the field. It has been thoroughly weeded, the small thickets of Rosa glauca have been removed and we’ve reduced the roots and overhead branches of the Prunus padus ‘Colorata’ to give other plants here a chance.
We’ve planted 100 new bulbs of narcissus ‘W.P. Milner’ to boost those already planted here and alongside them there’ll be shadeloving plants under the tree – blue pulmonarias and Omphalodes cappadocica, both members of the borage family packed with pollen and nectar for early-flying bees.
This bed forms part of our ‘Brick Garden’, alternatively known as the ‘Blue and Yellow Garden’, since apart from green, these are the colours we try and stick to. We'd planted camassias in this same bed, but whereas those on the other side of the garden thrive and multiply, in this bed it may be too dry and too shady. Epimediums would do well but we have to keep an informal ‘cottagey’ feel to the planting.
On the south side of the tree that’s no problem and rudbeckia and wood asters such as ‘Little Carlow’ should do well. So we’ll be dividing up existing plants in the spring and replanting some of the fresh pieces in this bed, too. At the same time, since we’ll discard old, woody middles, all the replanted pieces will be re-invigorated.
While we’re at it we’ll have a look at the heleniums that are planted in waves in this garden. In common with most late flowerers, we’d normally leave their division until spring, but if we feel they're ready to be pulled apart we’ll do it now. If you replant them in groups of three, a few inches apart, by next summer they’ll look like one buxom plant. Favourite here is ’El Dorado’, yellow as can be and longflowering, too.
We'll work our way through the garden after initially cutting back, scraping moss off the surface of beds, forking over lightly where soil is impacted, dividing and replanting where needed, including adding some totally new plants. As we ‘finish’ each bed, we’ll mulch and clear up the paths.
We’ve only just started and, like all resolutions, the easy part is making them, the difficult part is keeping them!
'One of the advantages of the bleak midwinter is that you don’t get sidetracked by all the tasks that need undertaking in summer'