Moving on
In the last of our seasonal visits to the garden of designer Mary Keen, we find Mary in reflective mood as she prepares to say goodbye to the Cotswold garden she has loved for so long
Autumn colour seems be happening later, possibly as a result of climate change. Foliage is the obvious star, but in small gardens, which have never been places to major in trees, there are compensations in those shrubs and flowers that suggest the reds, yellows and oranges of a perfect autumn display. When I started designing, orange for clients was taboo. I have always loved orange, especially when partnered with blue. Van Gogh wrote that ‘there is no blue without yellow and without orange’ and I try to keep this going all year in the gooseberry garden. The marigold Calendula officinalis ‘Indian Prince’ and the Great Dixter favourite Tagetes ‘Cinnabar’ are good with love-in-a-mist or Salvia patens. The marigolds flower endlessly if they are deadheaded, but the nigella is generally over by mid July. The seed pods are pretty, especially in the form N. hispanica. The orange-and-blue theme carries on with the best orange dahlia ‘Ludwig Helfert’, and one of my top plants, Symphyotrichum turbinellum. This Michaelmas daisy is a haze of tiny blue stars that appear a little later than the flowers of Symphyotrichum ‘Little Carlow’, another autumn plant I would not want to do without. Aster x frikartii ‘Mönch’ flowers for longer than either of my favourites and plenty of gardeners grow this aster for its perpetual habit, but its flowers are too large and too mauve for me. And it flops. Another good aster is the dark-stemmed S. laeve ‘Calliope’. I find the Aster amellus cultivars less easy to use, they have a stiff habit and tend to get mildew. Symphyotrichum novae-angliae ‘ Andenken an Alma Pötschke’ is a terrific shocking pink but its legs are hideous.
Admittedly most asters need a bit of support, unless they are chopped in late May to delay their flowering. The trick with staking is to get there before the stems collapse. I used to use pea sticks for most plants, but have recently found the canes and string method, which Fergus Garrett uses at Great Dixter, much easier. You plunge one bamboo into the ground near the centre of the plant and from that anchor, take twine to encircle each stem until you have completed the ring and tied the circle into the cane where you started. This way of staking is not strong enough for dahlias. We use iron stakes and string in the Fergus way, but the tallest of all dahlias, ‘Admiral Rawlings’, can be hard to tame, even with an iron rod.
Most garden tasks get lighter as summer ends, but late August is the best time for trimming the topiary. In a wet summer the yew grows fast and looks woolly, so it is tempting to start sooner. Too soon and the yew grows again, but some years, it takes two cuts to keep it tidy. This year’s trim was the Old Rectory’s last, for me at least. We must soon leave the garden which I have loved for a quarter of a century. A sad prospect, but gardens are ephemeral and rarely last for ever. It seems the right time to hand this one over to the care of a young family who love the place as much as we do, while I can look forward to the excitement of starting the process of creating a garden all over again.
Turn the page for Mary’s advice on combining colours for autumn