The Garden in December
As the cold starts to bite, Kari-Astri Davies discovers drops of winter colour and reflects on tasks still to be done
As we cosy up indoors, splatters of rain dash against the windows, as south-westerlies drive the wind soughing through the surrounding trees. Soon it will be the shortest day. This year, all the apple trees produced bumper crops, and I have raked the fallen fruit into piles. Maybe fieldfares will take up residence in the garden to gorge on the spoiling bounty. Last year’s paltry crop did not sustain them for long. We only saw fieldfares and redwings during the worst of the snow earlier in the year and put a few shop-bought apples out for them. There is also an abundance of holly berries. I will have to race the birds to make sure there are some branches left for Christmas decorations.
Unfinished projects
There are some confessions to make. A number of projects I said we would complete this year, we haven’t. For example, the corten steel step in the lawn from patio to borders has not happened yet. The steel still resides ready and waiting in the workshop. The plan for a quincunx of box trees to resolve the space between this step and the end of the rose border did not happen, and won’t. It was a bad idea. I move on towards the curved line of small-leaved limes at the back of the borders, which never did get pleached. They are starting to knit into a high-level hedge, giving the effect I had planned. Down into the copse at the end of the garden, advancing ivy runs along the ground, choking out plants in its path. Thuggish clumps of evergreen grass, Carex pendula, need taming. However, snowdrops are starting to break ground, which makes working tricky. I should have started this job earlier. We did finish a raised bed which has been an unsightly pile of clay for more than three years. Some box have edged this off nicely. Raided, with permission, from someone’s brick wall, they had been sitting in old compost bags with only a little soil and an occasional watering for more than a year. Box seems to be very tolerant when not under attack from caterpillars and blight. In the wood bed, there are scatters of pale and cerise pinks as the first Cyclamen coum flowers open. Depending on the weather, I may start to tackle the ground elder that has made so much headway this year. Winkling away with a hand fork following the roots, it will always be partial containment rather than eradication. It is also time to tidy up the veg plot, putting away pea and bean supports for next year. I was sad to hear that Beth Chatto had passed away. My earliest introduction to her gardening ideas was
“And slyly he traileth along the ground, And his leaves he gently waves” charles Dickens, ‘The Ivy Green’
Beth Chatto’s Garden Notebook, published in 1988. Reading the book, one can hear her gentle clipped voice as she talks about her thoughts and observations about working in the garden and the nursery. Beth’s mantra, ‘right plant, right place’, is now mainstream thinking. And it was her books which first opened my eyes to the subtlety of ‘green’ plants, not just flowers.
New beginnings
Under the pergola now, satin-leaved Arum creticum pushes through anew, pale lemon spathes appearing in April, before it disappears underground for the summer. In the wood bed, I have the white-veined Arum italicum italicum ‘Marmoratum’ planted among hellebores. It, too, dies away for a while, leaving behind stout clubs of orange berries into the autumn. I am considering adding more arum; maybe hunting out selected forms. They can then compete with our native cuckoo pint, Arum maculatum, which is a bit of a weed in the garden. Another plant which starts into growth and keeps building up through the winter is an umbellifer, Ferula communis, from the Mediterranean. By late May, it will be a large frothy mound of foliage, which might one day flower for me, before dying away in early summer to awake again come winter.
“I heard a bird sing In the dark of December. A magical thing And sweet to remember. ‘We are nearer to Spring Than we were in September’” Oliver Herford, ‘I Heard a Bird Sing’