Winter’s coming, but there’s still a lot to do

THE tender fuchsias that are brightening up my kitchen windowsill should have been cut back weeks ago and encouraged to go semidormant for the winter.

You do this by removing all foliage and flowers and giving the plants just enough water to keep them ticking over, then placing them somewhere cool, but frost-free, until spring.

Following the infestations of moths (they infiltrated a net of tulip bulbs) and mice (tulip bulbs again), there’s an unspoken agreement in our house that no plant material of any kind will be stored in the garage.

So, as my new garden doesn’t have a shed or a greenhouse, it came down to a choice between tossing the fuchsias on to the compost heap or bringing them inside.

Now they are sharing the windowsill with a couple of pelargoniums, a cactus plant and a pot of basil.

Fortunately, I don’t have to try and squeeze my growing collection of evergreen agapanthuses or my young fig tree on to the windowsill as well.

For a start they are just too big, but there’s also the fact they don’t actually need any winter warmth, they just need to be kept dry so it’s a bit of luck that the canopy over my front door extends quite far along the front of the house.

Simply by lining up the pots underneath it they should stay reasonably dry until I move them out again in spring.

Hurricane Ophelia and Storm Brian did little damage, but they brought down most of the leaves and now light is reaching parts of the garden that had been in shade.

Admittedly its the dwindling light of autumn and, now the clocks have gone back, that means darker evenings, but winter sunshine can be beautiful and I’m planning to grow lots of those little woodlanders, such as trilliums and hardy cyclamen which thrive beneath the open canopy of bare trees.

Meanwhile, the business of clearing up the leaves goes on and I’ve found myself becoming intrigued by the reindeer lichen that frequently appears amongst them.

It is branched, like coral, but feels like rubber and its sea green colour stands out amongst the browns and yellows of the leaf litter.

Lichen aren’t plants, they are formed by a strange partnership between fungi and bacteria and they can take many different forms.

Lots of different kinds grow here, coating branches in a silvery-crust and forming yellow bruises on stones and now that the trees have shed their leaves their colours are becoming more visible.

But I can’t spend all my time gazing into the branches, not while there’s work to be done.

I’ve got a huge clump of day lilies to move, a buddleia to be dug up and rehomed and large quantities of montbretia to remove – a Herculean task that will involve sieving the soil to catch any of the tiny bulbs that remain.