It’s the first Monday in November and it’s damp, mild and grey. I’ve just been for my usual ten-minute garden recce before I start writing for the day. The borders are covered in beech leaves and more are slowly helter-skeltering downwards despite the brisk breeze. This year the beech leaves are the colour of golden amber, because they were bathed in hot sunshine for most of the summer. Looking up to the sky, I can see there are plenty of leaves still waiting to flutter downwards – so for now I’m leaving the golden carpet alone. Or at least, I am leaving it alone for today.
Leaf gathering takes up a lot of time at Spring Cottage and I have mixed feelings about doing it, in any case. I wrestle with shall I, shan’t I every year. Half of me says, if I left those leaves alone the earthworms would pull them down into the ground. The other half worries. If I leave the leaves in situ, they’ll harbour little black slugs and they will damage vulnerable plants like my trilliums and snowdrops. Clearing some and leaving some would be fine, if I didn’t have the windiest garden in the village, in the county, possibly in the entire UK and the universe. For when the wind blows here, the leaves move into areas that I’ve just cleared. Eventually I gather them up.
There’s another logistical problem to be solved. The leaf bins are still full of leaf litter and that needs to be sieved in order to get the beech nuts out, before it can be spread on the woodland border. It’s perfect for woodland plants, because it is a very slow-release fertiliser and a moisture-retaining mulch. Subtext being, there isn’t anywhere to put the leaves until both leaf bins are empty. Sieving has to come first. Then the leaves need to be picked up and added to the two empty bins so that they can rot down for next year’s supply of black gold.
Leaf gathering doesn’t involve a mind-altering leaf blower or a leaf vacuum in my garden, because I want to preserve as much small insect life as possible at soil level. I also want to preserve my ear drums and those of my neighbours too. If there was a Room 101 for gardeners, I’d chuck them both in along with that other weapon of environmental warfare – the strimmer! No, my leaf gathering is done with a silent Bulldog rubber rake and I can look forward to plenty of wheelbarrow-pushing back and forth. No need for a gym when you garden, or that’s what I tell myself.
This year’s summer of sunshine made this autumn special and I have really enjoyed the autumn light show provided by the trees as they enter winter dormancy. No weeds or grass grew here during that hot, dry summer, until it rained in early September, and then there was a mighty explosion. Mowing has continued into late October and that’s a sure sign that climate change is with us. My garden’s 700 feet above sea level, so I haven’t had a frost yet because cold air drops down to the Windrush valley. They’ve had two frosts further down the hill. As a child frost always arrived by the middle of September – that’s another climate change clue.
I’m spending my spare time on my knees and that gives you an entirely different perspective, because you see everything from down there. There are plenty of snowdrop points appearing and ‘Fly Fishing’, named for its long wiry pedicel between stem to flower, will be out by Christmas as will ‘Mrs Macnamara’. Some autumn-flowering snowdrops came out in October and the best for me is always Galanthus elwesii ‘Barnes’. ‘Remember, Remember’, another named form of G. elwesii, is showing white. The Dutch bulb growers have been producing three snowdrops en masse, ‘Polar Bear’, ‘Beluga’ and ‘Snowfox’. I’ve nabbed some of those too, so look out for them.
Looking forward to the future, on a grey grisly day, is one of the great things about gardening and I have planted lots of spring-flowering bulbs. My favourite March-flowering narcissus, ‘Golden Echo’, is scented with very weather resistant flowers in cream and yellow. It avoids any hint of bilious vivid-yellow, a colour I try to avoid in spring, and it’s good in pots because it’s strong-stemmed. I am waiting to plant some ‘Spring Green’ tulips, because I like to have a potful on the edge of the woodland patch. These white and green ‘viridiflora’ tulips flower in the second half of April when many of the woodlanders have finished.
I’m also planning for next summer so I’ve been sowing sweet peas in the last few days. Autumn-sown seeds produce stronger plants than spring-sown seeds, because cool temperatures encourage better root growth. I haven’t grown them for some years, but I’ve missed them so much because they’re such a great cut flower. Sweet peas need lavishing with care, after they’ve been planted out, so I will need to water them in the mornings. I’m not quite sure where they’ll go at this stage but I’m looking for a spot in the garden. The allotment is half a mile away and that’s a long way to carry cans!
I particularly admire the rose-pink sweet pea ‘Mrs Bernard Jones’, for purely sentimental reasons. When I was a sixteen-year-old nursing cadet in Leamington Spa, I was given a bunch by our Pharmacist Bernard Jones. Many years later I realised that he was a famous sweet pea breeder. He never mentioned this at the time, but they softened a day in the austere place I called Colditz with caps and aprons.
Years later, someone told me that Bernard Jones wanted to name a really good sweet pea after Leamington’. Apparently, a fellow breeder (and good friend) Ken Colledge, knew this and deliberately pipped him at the post and released his lavender-blue ‘Leamington’ instead. I’m not at all sure if they remained friends, but the late Bernard Jones (who passed away in 1996) was a very affable man so I suspect he saw the funny side.
One of the best places to admire sweet peas is Lady Ursula Cholmondeley’s Easton Walled Garden in Lincolnshire. Lady Ursula concentrates on growing forty of the strongest sweet peas and these can be seen in her garden in June and early July. Easton Walled Garden trials five new varieties every year and adds the best ones to the following year’s display. There are two stars from last year’s mini trial. ‘Solway Shimmer’, a shorter frilly pink and purple, and ‘Maloy’, an apricot-orange that bears seven flowers per stem, will be grown next year. Both are stocked by English Sweet Peas.
If you want to see the display it’s a short window in early summer, because Lady Ursula’s sweet peas are allowed to self-seed. The home-grown seeds are sold in the shop and on their website. It’s quite possible to save your own seeds, because self-pollination takes place before the flowers open so the seeds always come true.
When arranging sweet peas Lady Ursula believes it’s important to grow a white, or cream-white, because it makes the other colours sing. She admires ‘Border Beauty’, an all-white with a pencil-thin blue line around each petal. I have sown ‘Jilly’, another cream-white. You also need some stronger colours and the bright-red ‘Toffee Apple’, which popped up as a rogue seed, is an Easton Walled Garden exclusive. She’s also very proud of ‘Pink Pimpernel’, a bright pink with an orange overlay. Her other tip is to cut your flowers early in the morning, just after they’ve opened. If flea beetle is a problem, leave them outdoors for a couple of hours.
Weeding and leaf gathering may seem tedious, but they allow you to problem solve and daydream and you notice the minutiae. The witch hazel buds, not quite as plump as usual because these winter beauties didn’t get enough summer moisture, will still make January special and the thought of those marmalade strands allows me to power through the drear month of November. Onwards and upwards – that’s the way!