Gardening
David Wheeler
Love him or hate him, Jack Frost is almost certain to make an appearance in northern European gardens this month.
If he can stay his hand for a few more weeks, October consigns to the garden a cornucopia of gilded riches. But not all is lost for, should he prove impatient, his crystal rime will beautify the plant world’s death and decay. Winners both.
When rising from the mercury’s lower depths where ol’ Jacko dwells, he wages immediate war on dahlias and chrysanthemums – turning their fat, still-to-bloom buds into soggy, beige pâté. Most fuchsias dislike him, although some are tough enough to fight back. He wreaks havoc among late-season half-hardy and tender perennials – salvias, canna lilies, begonias, coleus, pelargoniums… He kills stone dead summer-long flowering annuals, bringing tears to the eyes as cosmos, tobacco plants, calendulas and tagetes perish in his icy caress. In short, he brings down the curtain on the year’s Act III: Autumn.
Yet, on his first and more clement visits, JF throws a magical, renegade gauze over the garden; something transluscent, fugitive, only mildly injurious and, with luck, brief – exiting stage right before the gardener’s midmorning coffee break.
Like March, the third month of the year, October, three months from the year’s end, is capricious.
It can proffer a few gloriously benign weeks of warm sunshine; an extension to the gardening season that sees a burnishing of stems and foliage, brilliantly splashed with dashes of sapphire and lapis lazuli, as blue hydrangeas continue to illuminate the shadows, and patches of autumn-flowering gentians spread their upright trumpets beneath trees and shrubs. Or it can be thoroughly mischievous – remember the Great Storm of 1987 that felled countless millions of trees in a swathe of south-east England that extended from Dorset to East Anglia?
And it is to trees and shrubs that I turn my attention during this month. There’s no better time to plant them: the soil is moist (some might say sodden) and it’s warm enough for fresh roots to develop, penetrate new surroundings and start to anchor themselves securely.
During lockdown, it was nigh on impossible to go nursery-hopping and even in recent weeks, now more used to staying – contented, perhaps, to stay – at home, I’ve found new ways to satisfy my acquisitive traits. As a late comer to Instagram (I still eschew Facebook and Twitter), I’ve discovered a world of private gardeners willing to share both knowledge and plants. Best of all, this kindly army of green-fingered beings stretches far beyond our own shores.
While respecting individual countries’ regulations about sending and receiving foreign plants and seeds, I have built a network of law-abiding swappers who have supplied my beds, borders, potting shed, greenhouse and propagating cases with a wealth of horticultural treasures.
Polite requests from an amateur like me or professionals employed by the large estates and botanic gardens are seldom refused. After all, we gardeners know that if we want to save a plant, we must give it (or, more realistically, its progeny) away.
Little envelopes filled with specks of seed is the adult gardener’s equivalent of a child’s excited pre-dawn discovery of a bulging Christmas stocking at the foot of the bed. I love, too, the accompanying little notes offering advice on how and where to sow, how to nurture, when to transplant…
And if any questions remain, there’s that social-media link whence further information can be gleaned. The smartphone has become an essential addition to the gardener’s paraphernalia.