The garden in... September and October
Kari-Astri Davies is enjoying the fruits of autumn and preparing her garden for the months ahead
September in the garden flows seemlessly from the last days of the summer to the beginning of autumn. It is a time of coming and going. The last swallows are still moving south in chittering waves. Soon we’ll be saying hello to fieldfares and redwings heading from more northerly climes to overwinter here. Plants from the summer are enjoying on a final blaze of glory, while the autumnal stars are waiting in the wings for their turn on stage.
Battling brambles
We rent a small field owned by the parish. In February, we cleared the brambles from the hedgerow along the boundary. Fierce, thick arching stems powered through and over the hedgerow trees. Great shocks of white roots sprang from the thuggish stems where they touched the ground. Runners scurried off through the lush grass, tripping the unwary and, by the end of the day, the tired. Brambles don’t go willingly into the fire. Barbs grab at clothing, desperate to avoid the conflagration, finally imparting a sweetness to the smoke as they burn. It was surprising how one of our pet sheep got so deeply anchored in the hedge by seemingly small sections of bramble. The harder she pulled away, the more entangled she became. I had to tease the prickles out of her wool with my fingers to free her. In his book Englishman’s Flora, Geoffrey Grigson tells a country tale of the cormorant, the bramble and the bat. The cormorant was once a wool merchant, who did a deal with the bat and the bramble to ship a boatload of wool overseas. The boat sank, so the cormorant is always diving to find the wool; the bat owes creditors money for the unsold wool, so hides away until dark, and the prickly bramble tries to make up its losses by grabbing wool from passing sheep. Now, in autumn, the brambles have again made headway in the hedgerow and are bearing juicy blackberries. It’s odd that birds never eat them all, leaving many to rot as autumn progresses. We do this too, once, as they say, the devil has spat on them on Michaelmas Day. In late winter, I did see a pair of bullfinches making the best of some of the last dry seedy remnants. To celebrate the beginning of autumn, I’ll make
“The spirits of the air live in the smells Of fruit; and Joy, with pinions light, roves round The gardens, or sits singing in the trees. Thus sang the jolly Autumn as he sat” William blake, ‘To Autumn’
some blackberry and apple jam or a fruit crumble with the hedgerow gleanings and some ‘Bramleys’ from our old apple trees.
Cooking apples
We have three cooking apple trees in the garden, all old and gnarly, and, I think, all different cultivars. At some point, these trees have had great old branches cut back hard. We’re still trying to bring under control the long water shoots that the trees produced in reaction to this. We’ll have another go at remedial pruning in late winter. I’m guessing the veg patch cooking apple is a ‘Bramley’; green with slightly rosy cheeks where it has been warmed by the sun. The flesh cooks down to a puree. One of the others could be ‘James Grieve’, as the fruit is rosier than a ‘Bramley’. It doesn’t bear big crops of fruit every year, more hit and miss. The flesh doesn’t cook down completely and some of the apple pieces retain their shape. Unlike the ‘Bramley’, it’s not a particularly good keeper. I’m also wondering if an apple tree I’d assumed was an eater is actually a cooker. It looks gorgeous now, hung with smallish fruit of the deepest burnished red, such as Snow White’s apple. The fruit tastes vile, belying those perfect looks. I’ll try cooking some and see. Perhaps it’s a cider apple? Maybe I’ll pop along to an apple event this autumn to get them identified. ›
“In this latest comer the vanished summer Has left its sunshine the world to cheer, And bids us remember in late September What beauty mates with the passing year.” Lucy Maud Montgomery, ‘In the Days of the Golden Rod’