On goes the tidy-up to get winter-ready
The garden looks very ragged: perennials are keeling over and although most of the leaves are down, they’re yet to be cleared. Every time I start, I disturb sleepy frogs. The mild autumn went on forever so there’s still so much to do. I tried to restore order to borders by cutting back in time for the last green bin collection of the year, but I still need to apply mulch. The water in the rill is stagnant and needs to be dredged before it freezes. Last year we didn’t manage to clean it before the frogspawn appeared in spring. I’ve finally dug up rose ‘Oxfordshire’, as it’s been on the wain for a couple of years, and replaced with bare-root ‘Jacqueline Du Pré’. I couldn’t bear to part with it just yet so I’ve potted it up to see if it will revive. David and I have been dismantling the patio displays: we managed to manhandle the banana into the greenhouse, along with fuchsia ‘Thalia’. I’ve cleaned out the greenhouse gutters, labelled the perennial divisions and brought semi-hardy plants under cover, with cuttings and mini plug plants in the heated propagators. The begonias have been lifted, their tubers dried and stored, and replaced with red and magenta cyclamen and I’ve crammed in as many bulbs as I dare on top of last year’s bulbs, which I inadvertently left in the containers.
Everything is flowering out of sync in the north-facing front raised bed. While cannas and ricinus are still flowering, Corsican hellebores and Fatsia japonica ‘Spider’s Web’ are coming into bloom, and the contorted hazel has been adorned with festive lights even though its leaves are stubbornly sticking to their branches.
Giant salvias are still providing lots of bold colour. I’ve decided to leave them in the borders this winter as they’re too large to lift, so I’ll be mulching them with a thick layer of manure and taking cuttings as insurance. Miniature Fuchsia microphylla is covered in dainty magenta flowers and tufty flowers of miscanthus are the central focal point of the garden.
As it sheds its foliage, the emerging red stems of the contorted willow look stunning. Last to drop their buttery yellow leaves are the fiery orange-stemmed dogwoods.
One of the highlights of the winter garden is the return of all our birds. The goldfinches have been lured back with a new feeder of niger seeds, and a nuthatch has become a new regular visitor to the peanut feeder, when the squirrels and parakeets aren’t fighting it out!
We successfully held our Horticultural Society AGM by Zoom, where I was voted in as the new chair, but most surprising of all was David and I receiving the Banksian medal “in recognition of (our) outstanding and innovative contributions to the Society and its membership during the Covid-19 pandemic 2020 through a variety of online initiatives”.
My highlight
Finding the most unusual earthstar fungi among the wild strawberries and ferns.